Lambda the Ultimate

The documents on this page consolidate a possible amendment to Ada 95 with Technical Corrigendum 1 and the Ada Standard (International Standard ISO/IEC 8652:1995). The Amendment will be produced by the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 22/WG 9 Ada Rapporteur Group (ARG). The final form of the Amendment, or whether its standardization will succeed, are not known at this time. Thus, any proposed feature may be substantially changed or withdrawn before the Amendment begins standardization. These draft documents are not an official publication or work product of the ARG, but rather are provided by Ada Europe as a service to the Ada community.

Ada is a quite well designed language (despite having quirks like any other language, of course). The design process is impressive, as you can see if you check the ARG website.

The next version of Ada is almost ready, and you can get a taste of what's coming up by reading the reference manual, or the Annotated Ada 2006 Language Reference Manual which includes more detailed language design reasoning.

Among the new things in Ada06 are: interfaces (as in Java), mutually dependent references between units and finer control over access from the private part of a package, standard library enhancements including a comprehensive container library, file and directory management etc. and extensive additions to the Real-Time Systems Annex.

The Real-Time Systems Annex which specifies additional characteristics of Ada implementations intended for real-time systems, and is one of Ada's strong points, now includes the Ravenscar profile for high-integrity systems, further dispatching policies such as Round Robin and Earliest Deadline First, support for timing events, and support for control of CPU time utilization.