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ARA Gains New Member in an Old Friend
By
Ann S. Brandon
Old friends who turn into new are even better than gold.
The Ada Resource Assoc. (ARA) today announced that a new member, SofCheck, Inc., is replacing an old, Avercom. S. Tucker Taft is the first president of SofCheck and the long-standing president of the ARA.
“Ada’s future growth and stability are crucial to my new company’s bottom line,” Mr. Taft said. “The ARA works hard to guarantee both for me and my colleagues.”
 Formerly of Avercom, Mr. Taft has founded SofCheck in order to support quality-oriented software development teams. One of his first moves was to make the new company an ARA member, an Ada-promotion group that includes over 90 percent of the Ada tool and compiler developers.
Established in April 2002, SofCheck has three technology specialties: an automated bug detector, a software development portal, and AdaMagicTM.
SofCheck’s AdaMagic Technology has a broad and deep history in leading Ada software development. Created at Intermetrics, Inc., in 1993 by the same team that designed the Ada95 standard, AdaMagic was the basis for the first Ada95 compiler validated under the Ada95 version of the ACVC/ACATS test suite.
The AdaMagic technology suite includes an Ada95 front end adaptable to generate various different intermediate representations, and a portable Ada95 run-time system suitable for both bare board and RTOS-based environments. Existing versions of the AdaMagic front end generate Java byte codes (AppletMagic), optimized ANSI C, and various other more conventional compiler ILs.
AdaMagic technology is used in the Green Hills Software AdaMultiTM product line, the Aonix ObjectAdaTM product line, the SHARC AdaMagic compiler for the Analog Devices SHARC DSP, and for other proprietary chips. The ANSI-C-generating variant of the AdaMagic front end has been used on various projects enabling existing Ada code to be used in environments where there is no traditional Ada compiler available.
A founder of the ARA, Mr. Taft is a cornerstone in the Ada community. From 1990-95, he led the Ada9X design team and succeeded in making Ada95 the first ISO standardized object-oriented programming language. In his twenty years with AverCom (AverStar, previously Intermetrics), Mr. Taft became President of AverCom Corporation (a Titan Company).
Prior to 1990, Mr. Taft participated in the development of the Ada Integrated Environment (AIE) for the Air Force, a commercial C cross-compiler (InterTools C), the Common APSE Interface Set (CAIS), and an Ada binding to SQL (SAME).
Mr. Taft graduated from Harvard College in 1975 with a bachelor’s in Chemistry, Summa Cum Laude.
For more information, please check SofCheck’s website
http://www.sofcheck.com
or contact
Ann S. Brandon
Communications Director, ARA
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