Definition of Ada (Programming)

The first programmer in history was Augusta Ada King (Byron by birth, daughter of the well-known poet Lord Byron), Countess of Lovelace, who wrote a series of algorithms for her use in Charles' Universal Analytical Engine Babbage.

Although the machine did not thrive, Ada's keen analytical mind made her go down in history as the first person to be considered to have written a TV show. computer and, therefore, the first programmer. Such merit should have its tribute and this, how could it be otherwise, had to come in the form of language from programming.

Ada is a general-purpose programming language that follows the philosophy of object-orientation, which, while being easy, is also very complete.

However, it is not among the most widely used languages, lagging behind C / C ++ or Java, most of the time reduced to a mere scope academic thanks to its simplicity.

The creation of this programming language was commissioned by the United States Department of Defense in the 1970s, so security plays an important role.

That is why, outside the aforementioned academic field, the use of this language has been intended for mission-critical and control systems, tasks in which failures are not permissible.

Sectors such as air or rail traffic control (in which an error can cause an accident and, with it, cost the people's lives), machinery control in heavy industry, or in the defense and military sector, are the fields from app habitual of this language.

In order to deal with the resolution of programming errors, Ada was designed as a strongly typed language.

This means that we must declare all variables with a certain existing type, so that the system knows exactly how to handle them.

In a strongly typed language, these errors are detected at compile time, so we will no longer have to suffer them at runtime.

Also included in this language are a series of safeguards that constantly monitor what the program does.

These mechanisms affect the performance with which the program is executed, so we can deactivate them in the event that we want it to work in a faster way, although this will be to coast to sacrifice a substantial part of the safety of execution.

Another interesting feature of Ada that makes it ideal for mission-critical tasks is that it offers, from the base, native mechanisms to take advantage of the multithreaded capabilities of the computers.

This allows the programmer to launch processes in parallel to, for example, start another task, perform calculations or operations whose results are required in the main program, or carry out simulations whose results are taken into account in the program principal.

For anyone who wants to enter the world of programming in Ada, there is extensive documentation freely accessible at Internet, in addition to free compilers like GNAT.

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