ADA Volume 28 USER Number 1 March 2007 JOURNAL Contents Page Editorial Policy for Ada User Journal 2 Editorial 3 News 5 Conference Calendar 38 Forthcoming Events 45 Articles C. Comar, R. Berrendonner “ERB : A Ravenscar Benchmarking Framework” 53 Ada-Europe 2006 Sponsors 64 Ada-Europe Associate Members (National Ada Organizations) Inside Back Cover Ada User Journal Volume 28, Number 1, March 2007 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 28, Number 1, March 2007 Ada User Journal 3 Editorial In the foreword to volume 28 of the Ada User Journal, which commences with the present issue, our memory goes to one very good and one very sad news that opened the year 2007 by occurring in the short span of two calendar days: On January 24, the Amendment to ISO/IEC 8652 (which we call and will keep calling ‘Ada 2005’ in the vernacular) was finally approved by ISO. All nations who participate in WG9 voted to approve and no comments were submitted, which were definite tokens of excellent technical work and also cohesive and determined national support. And that was a very good news indeed. (For the record, it took in fact another 7 weeks, until March 9, for the Amendment to be finally published on the ISO calatogue. But then it was.) The sad news came only two days after that. On January 26, Jean Ichbiah, the man who designed Ada, passed away at 66. I have read many nice words about Jean Ichbiah from various authorities who wrote about him, and more you will read for yourselves in the News section of this issue. I have to say however that I was most impressed by some passages of the obituary that the Boston Globe run about him shortly after his death. I wish to share some excerpts of that with you in this editorial. Jean said in 1984 in an interview to the CACM celebrating the birth of Ada: "I see myself really as an architect, […] My work was not to invent new things; it was not research work, it was architectural work. I had to integrate the best available materials to construct the building that would best suit the requirements of the users." He viewed the Ada language "as a cathedral with all the architectural lines interwoven in a harmonious manner," I find this is a very good way of remembering who Jean Ichbiah was to the Ada community. It is so very sad that he passed away. It is reassuring and conforting though that his creature is still well and alive some 30 years after he took it on himself to design it. Returning to the more mundane task of illustrating the contents of the issue and the plans for the remainder of the volume, I am pleased to welcome the contribution of Romain Berrendonner and Cyrille Comar of the Paris offices of AdaCore, who report on the development and experimental use of a software infrastructure commissioned by the European Space Agency for benchmarking the space and time performance of Ravenscar technology and applications. The report on that project constitutes the technical matter of the present issue. Future issues will have reports from the IRTAW-13 workshop, which will take place in April at Woodstock, Vermont, USA (cf. the technical program in this issue) and staggered proceedings of the industrial track of the Ada-Europe 2007 conference, which will be held in Geneva, CH, in June. The rest of the issue contains news, and calendar events of interest to the Ada community, as usual, gathered for you from our News and Calendar editors. Tullio Vardanega Padova March 2007 Email: [email protected] Ada User Journal Volume 28, Number 1, March 2007 5 News Santiago Urueña Technical University of Madrid (UPM). Email: [email protected] <http://www.adaic.com/standards/ Disclaimer: ada05.html> http://www.kuleuven.be/cwis/email_discl Contents SC22/WG9 is already looking at the aimer.htm future and several activities are currently [See also "ARA — Technical Work on underway: Ada 2005 Standard Completed" in AUJ Ada-related Organizations 5 27-2 (Jun 2006) p.69 and "Ada 2005 Ada-related Events 7 The ARG (Ada Rapporteur Group) now Published by ISO" in this issue —su] Ada and Education 9 focuses on (in decreasing order of Ada-related Tools 9 priority) Ada 2005 Published by ISO Ada-related Products 11 ⁃ developing a revision of ISO/IEC 15291 And and CORBA 17 (the ASIS standard), on the one hand to From: Randy Brukardt Ada and GNU/Linux 17 bring it in sync with the new Ada 2005 <[email protected]> Ada and Microsoft 18 standard and on the other hand to provide Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2007 11:47:59 −0600 References to Publications 18 a semantic interface at a higher level of Subject: Re: Ada 2005 ISO approval yet? Ada Inside 18 abstraction (i.e. easier to use); Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Ada in Context 22 ⁃ responding to Defect Reports and/or > When will Ada 2005 become official? Ada Issues on ISO/IEC 8652 (the Ada Not until it is published by ISO. How standard); Ada-related long that will take is anyone's guess Organizations ⁃ developing Technical Reports or (sometimes, it has been over a year). All Standards improving the Ada libraries, of the approval votes have finished, Ada-Belgium — Ada 2005 notably with respect to containers; and though, so the remaining wait is purely Approved ⁃ considering proposals for extending the administrative.