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ARA Press Release


Media Contact:
Ann Brandon
Phone: (802) 728-9947
e-mail: info@adaresource.com


Ada RESOURCE ASSOC. REPRESENTS OVER 90% OF Ada TOOLS MARKET:

WELCOMES GREEN HILLS SOFTWARE

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah–The Ada Resource Association has welcomed Green Hills Software as its newest member. Green Hills Software has joined Ada Core Technologies, Aonix, Averstar, DDC-I, OC Systems, and Rational as members of the Ada Resource Association. Together the companies represent over ninety percent of the Ada tools market.

S. Tucker Taft, ARA president and Technical Director of Averstar's Distributed IT Solutions, said, "The ARA can now speak with confidence for the Ada vendor community. I would like to thank Green Hills for signing up as part of our team. They are already extremely valuable partners."

At the Software Technology Conference where the ARA met, John Carbone, Green Hills Vice President of Marketing, said, "Ada has proven to be a significant, growing business for us. Its being a standard is a strong selling point. Of course, the language will continue to evolve to stay at the forefront of technological innovations. Through the ARA, Green Hills will be able to support and influence those changes, and help enlarge the market for Ada software."

The ARA is actively engaged in meeting the expanding requirements of the worldwide Ada user community. Formed in 1989 as the Ada Software Alliance, its objective is to promote and enhance the use of the Ada language and associated software engineering technology in applications and programs that benefit the customer.

Green Hills Software, Inc., has invested over $30 million in research and development since its inception in 1982. The company has always concentrated on 32-bit and 64-bit microprocessors intended for use in embedded applications. In 1990, Green Hills Software added the MULTI(R) Integrated Software Development Environment, including AdaMULTI(R), to its product line. Head quartered in Santa Barbara, Calif., with branches in a dozen other national and international offices, Green Hills has centralized its Ada Operations in Palm Harbor, Fla..

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For more general information on Ada and the ARA members, please check the following sites:

http://www.adaresource.com

http://www.adaresource.com/intro/overview.html

http://www.adaresource.com/docs/flyers/whyada.html

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BACKGROUND MATERIAL

The History and Future of the Ada Programming Language

Named in honor of the world's first computer programmer, Augusta Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace, Ada is a high-level programming language designed to support the construction of long- lived, highly reliable software systems.

The Ada programming language was designed under US Dept. of Defense auspices for applications where correctness, safety, and reliability are the prime goals. In 1983, Ada became a standard, with a revision in 1995.

As the first internationally standardized object-oriented programming language, Ada 95 is well suited for developing reusable components, real-time and parallel processing systems, and interfaces with systems written in other languages. Advanced features include: a high level of abstraction, strong typing, OOP characteristics (classes, inheritance, polymorphism, late binding), and tasking constructions.

The new standard of Ada 95 was designed and developed by an international process of unprecedented scale for a programming language. A Board of Distinguished Reviewers representing six different countries and comprising 28 world-renowned leaders in academia and industry provided oversight and evaluation of the immense input from the international community of users.

The revision, which required over four years to complete, is an update of the 1987 International Organization for Standardization (ISO) release and the equivalent 1983 American National Standards Institute (ANSI) Ada standard.

ISO delegates unanimously accepted the revision. Ada 95 also received ANSI approval, following a period of public review and comment, and has been adopted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology as a Federal Information Processing Standard.

The capabilities of Ada 83 were enhanced for Ada 95 through the definition of a small number of new "building blocks" in three basic areas: object oriented programming, programming in the large, and real-time and parallel programming. In each case, the revision team used existing features as the basis for enhanced capabilities. The language is fully portable and successfully addresses programming concerns such as the effective integration of legacy systems and upward compatibility, as well as efficient "programming in the large," the development of very large programs, which are often over one million lines of code.

This building process ensured that the revision was a natural evolution, one that would increase Ada's popularity with new users, while maintaining its appeal to existing users. The goal was to enhance the language to support new and more complex system implementations, but not to disrupt its use in existing applications. To achieve this, Ada 95 retains the inherent integrity and efficiency of its predecessor, as the first advanced building block language to assemble a host of important features, while adhering to the demands of modern software engineering practice.


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