Intellectual Ammunition Department

This floor provides information on:

Ada, the language: why was Ada created? This programming language is the result of careful, deliberate design choices; by design it is intended to solve (directly or indirectly) many definite problems in software engineering. Many of these problems still plague those who do not use Ada.
Ada 95: how good is the revised language? More than ten years of use led quite naturally to a number of requests for improvements. The revised standard (Ada 95) is Ada 83 with more flexibility but still answering the original design concerns: program reliability and maintenance, programming as a human activity, and efficiency.
Moving from C/C++ to Ada: upgrade your programming skills. Programmers who know C++ will find it easy to move to Ada 95, and it is likely to be a pleasant experience.
Team Ada: an informal organisation dedicated to telling the world about the advantages of Ada.
Ada in Industry: success stories in the commercial world; facts and myths about Ada. Annual Ada application development is evaluated at over US$4 billions.
Academia and Ada: educational donations and discounts on complete development environments; "free" and low-cost compilers; who teaches Ada. Academic institutions can easily get professional Ada development tools.
A bibliography of Ada articles in the trade press
Associations and Special Interest Groups

A very important paper has been available and neglected for a long time. Read "Comparing Development Costs of C and Ada", written by Stephen F. Zeigler, Ph.D., of Rational Software Corporation.

If you know someone (programmer or manager) who doesn't understand that Ada is much more efficient, maintainable, and cost-effective than C and its scions, get them to read this paper. Maybe they'll understand the bottom line:

Ada is an asset, using it is profitable;
and by comparison C is a liability.

Page last modified: 1998-12-25