Ada{A Crash Course Peter Chapin∗ Vermont Technical College Generated: July 27, 2015 ∗
[email protected] Contents 2 1 Tutorial Welcome to the Ada programming language! The purpose of this tutorial is to give you an overview of Ada so that you can start writing Ada programs quickly. This tutorial does not attempt to cover the entire language. Ada is very large, so complete coverage of all its features would take many more pages than are contained in this document. However, it is my hope that after reading this tutorial you will have a good sense of what Ada is like, appreciate some of its nicer features, and feel interested in learning more [?, ?, ?, ?, ?]. This tutorial assumes you are already familiar with one or more languages in the C family: C, C++, Java, C#, or something similar. It is not my intention to teach you how to program. I assume you already understand concepts such as loops, data types, functions, and so forth. Instead this tutorial describes how to use these things in Ada. In cases where Ada provides features that might be unfamiliar to you (such as subtypes, discriminated types, and tasking) I will discuss those features a bit more comprehensively. Ada is a powerful language designed to address the following issues: • The development of very large programs by multiple, loosely connected teams. The language has features to help manage a large number of program components, and to help ensure those components are used consistently. • The development of long lived programs that spend most of their time in the maintenance phase of the software life cycle.