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Ada User Journal ADA Volume 24 USER Number 1 JOURNAL March 2003 Contents Page Editorial Policy for Ada User Journal 2 Editorial 3 News 4 Conference Calendar 42 Forthcoming Events 50 Articles Javier Miranda “A Guided Tour to the GNAT Runtime” 55 Alan Burns “Increasing the Real-Time Expressive Power of Ada 95” 60 Ada-Europe 2002 Sponsors 64 Ada-Europe Associate Members (National Ada Organizations) Inside Back Cover Ada User Journal Volume 24, Number 1, March 2003 2 Editorial Policy for Ada User Journal Publication Original Papers Commentaries Ada User Journal – The Journal for the Manuscripts should be submitted in We publish commentaries on Ada and international Ada Community – is accordance with the submission software engineering topics. These published by Ada-Europe. It appears guidelines (below). may represent the views either of four times a year, on the last days of individuals or of organisations. Such March, June, September and All original technical contributions are articles can be of any length – December. Copy date is the first of the submitted to refereeing by at least two inclusion is at the discretion of the month of publication. people. Names of referees will be kept Editor. confidential, but their comments will Opinions expressed within the Ada Aims be relayed to the authors at the discretion of the Editor. User Journal do not necessarily Ada User Journal aims to inform represent the views of the Editor, Ada- readers of developments in the Ada The first named author will receive a Europe or its directors. programming language and its use, complimentary copy of the issue of the general Ada-related software Journal in which their paper appears. Announcements and Reports engineering issues and Ada-related We are happy to publicise and report activities in Europe and other parts of By submitting a manuscript, authors grant Ada-Europe an unlimited license on events that may be of interest to our the world. The language of the journal readers. is English. to publish (and, if appropriate, republish) it, if and when the article is Although the title of the Journal refers accepted for publication. We do not Reviews to the Ada language, any related topics require that authors assign copyright to Inclusion of any review in the Journal are welcome. In particular papers in the Journal. is at the discretion of the Editor. any of the areas related to reliable Unless the authors state explicitly A reviewer will be selected by the software technologies. otherwise, submission of an article is Editor to review any book or other taken to imply that it represents publication sent to us. We are also The Journal publishes the following prepared to print reviews submitted types of material: original, unpublished work, not under consideration for publication else- from elsewhere at the discretion of the • Refereed original articles on where. Editor. technical matters concerning Ada and related topics. News and Product Announcements Submission Guidelines Ada User Journal is one of the ways in All material for publication should be • News and miscellany of interest to which people find out what is going on sent to the Editor, preferably in the Ada community. in the Ada community. Since not all of electronic format. The Editor will only accept typed manuscripts by prior • Reprints of articles published our readers have access to resources arrangement. elsewhere that deserve a wider such as the World Wide Web and Prospective authors are encouraged to audience. Usenet, or have enough time to search through the information that can be contact the Editor by email to • Commentaries on matters relating found in those resources, we reprint or determine the best format for to Ada and software engineering. report on items that may be of interest submission. Contact details can be to them. found near the front of each edition. • Announcements and reports of Example papers conforming to conferences and workshops. Reprinted Articles formatting requirements as well as some word processor templates are • Reviews of publications in the While original material is our first available from the editor. There is no field of software engineering. priority, we are willing to reprint (with limitation on the length of papers, the permission of the copyright holder) though a paper longer than 10,000 • Announcements regarding material previously submitted words would be regarded as standards concerning Ada. elsewhere if it is appropriate to give it exceptional. a wider audience. This includes papers Further details on our approach to published in North America that are these are given below. not easily available in Europe. We have a reciprocal approach in granting permission for other publications to reprint papers originally published in Ada User Journal. Volume 24, Number 1, March 2003 Ada User Journal 3 Editorial Volume 24 of the Ada User Journal opens with an issue that features two highlights: our continued and close look into the on- going Ada language revision process and an even bigger News section, which was afforded, for the expected gratification of the readership, by temporary changes in the Journal advertising policy. After the introductory presentation of the language revision process that Pascal Leroy, the rapporteur of the ARG, the group that runs the revision process, offered to AUJ 23-4, we now turn our attention to one of major areas of activity in the revision process: the enhancement of the already powerful real-time programming model of the language, the intent of which is to further strengthen the leading role that Ada plays in the real-time and high-integrity application domains. Alan Burns, who represents the Ada real-time community in the ARG, gives us an overview of the current highlights of the real-time oriented proposals for language enhancements. Finally, in this issue we have the pleasure of hosting a paper by Javier Miranda, which, after so often recurring the News section of the Journal, briefly walks us through his enormously informative work on the description of the internals of the GNAT runtime. Let me close by reassuring the readers that we continue our effort to bring the Journal back to its calendar schedule, while being all the more eager to contributions from the Ada community at large. Tullio Vardanega Padova March 2003 Email: [email protected] Ada User Journal Volume 24, Number 1, March 2003 4 News Dirk Craeynest (ed) Offis nv/sa and K.U.Leuven. Email [email protected] [...] the ARA has decided to open up verification of software, rather than membership from its original tool and relying on the inherently more risk-prone Contents compiler vendors to anyone interested in and expensive use of testing as the page supporting Ada's future. [...] principal verification activity. Ada-related Organizations 4 Ada-related Events 4 New: Join the Ada Resource Association: SPARK is a programming language that Ada and Education 7 An introduction to the ARA's work for the facilitates Correctness-by-Construction. Ada-related Resources 9 Ada community and benefits of ARA Its most important property is that it has a Ada-related Tools 10 membership. totally unambiguous semantics. This Ada-related Products 17 http://www.adaic.org/ARA/join.html [...] enables static analysis of the language to Ada and Linux 24 be both precise (i.e. the results really Ada and Microsoft 24 Ann Brandon, Editorial Webmaster mean something and there's a very low References to Publications 25 "false alarm" rate) and efficient so the tool Ada Inside 27 support is actually useful during Ada in Context 34 Ada-related Events development rather than just being used retrospectively. [The announcements reported below are a SPARK is an annotated subset of Ada95, Ada-related selection of the many Ada-related events so the language inherits all of the support Organizations organized by local groups. If you are for commercial compilers, tools and organizing such an event, feel free to training available from the wider Ada Tucker Taft at Helm of ARA inform us as soon as possible. If you community. The "annotations" extend the attended one please consider writing a subset's support for design-by- and SofCheck small report for the Journal. -- dc] contract(tm), allowing packages and From: Editorial Webmaster subprograms to specify their intended <[email protected]> Dec 6 - Public Technical behaviour precisely at various levels of Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2002 11:56:04 -0500 Briefing on SPARK rigour and detail. Subject: [AdaIC] S. Tucker Taft at Helm of SPARK has over 10 years of industrial ARA and SofCheck From: [email protected] (Rod Chapman) use, mainly in the European Aerospace To: [email protected] Date: 27 Nov 2002 05:30:16 -0800 and Rail industries, but remains less well Subject: ANNOUNCE: Public technical S. Tucker Taft has rejoined the ARA as known in the USA, although SPARK is briefing on SPARK, Houston actually recommended by NASA's own president of SofCheck. Tucker is a Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada founder and president of both SofCheck, guidance for safety-critical software. This Inc., and the ARA. The ARA is seeing an As a "warm up" event for ACM SIGAda briefing will examine some of the most old friend turn into the newest member of 2002, Praxis Critical Systems will be notable SPARK projects, including the Ada software tool and compiler vendors. presenting a public technical briefing on Lockheed C130J, and how SPARK is SPARK on Friday 6th December. This effective in meeting standards such as Tucker is an old friend of the Ada event in aimed at engineers and managers DO-178B. Finally, we will consider some community, too, as we need not tell most involved in the design and procurement of of the barriers (both actual and mythical) of you: From 1990-95, he led the Ada9X high-integrity software, and especially that may have hindered the adoption of design team and succeeded in making those involved in the aviation and space SPARK in other projects.
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