ADA Volume 33 USER Number 3 September 2012 JOURNAL Contents Page Editorial Policy for Ada User Journal 138 Editorial 139 Quarterly News Digest 141 Conference Calendar 165 Forthcoming Events 170 Press Release “First ‘Ada Way’ Award Winners and ‘Try and Beat Me’ Challenge” 175 Special Contribution J. G. P. Barnes “Rationale for Ada 2012: 4 Tasking and Real-Time” 178 Ada-Europe 2012 Panels T. Vardanega, F. Gasperoni, E. Plödereder, J. M. Martínez Rodríguez, B. Meyer, A. Llemosí “What is language technology in our time” 187 J. Bundgaard, A. Rodríguez, S. Palm, R. E. Sward, J. Ruiz “Reliable software, a perspective from industry” 204 Ada Way Report R. Aguirre Reyes, A. Graziano, M. Teoli, A. Zuccato “The Ada Way: development of a soccer simulator” 212 Articles from the Industrial Track of Ada-Europe 2012 F. Dordowsky, R. Bridges, H. Tschöpe “Combining Code Generation and Ada Generics to implement a Software Product Line” 217 Ada Gems 227 Ada-Europe Associate Members (National Ada Organizations) 230 Ada-Europe 2012 Sponsors Inside Back Cover Ada User Journal Volume 33, Number 3, September 2012 138 Editorial Policy for Ada User Journal Publication Original Papers Commentaries Ada User Journal — The Journal for Manuscripts should be submitted in We publish commentaries on Ada and the 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 last day of submitted to refereeing by at least two inclusion is at the discretion of the 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 33, Number 3, September 2012 Ada User Journal 139 Editorial The Ada User Journal is produced by a group of hard working volunteers, which dedicate some of their time to guarantee that the Journal continues its quality production in a (as much as possible) timely manner, so it is important, and pleasant, when we have the opportunity to enlarge this group with new and motivated helping hands. It is thus with contentment that I inform that starting with this issue, Patricia López Martínez, from the University of Cantabria, Spain, takes the role of Assistant Editor in the Editorial Board of the Journal. Patrícia is, since last August, assisting in the production of the Journal, successfully and smoothly taking much of the production tasks. I take the opportunity to welcome her and wish her a very successful term. And the term started with really an impressive issue. These 94 pages (the largest issue in my term as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal) provide a very interesting and diversified set of contents, which, I am sure, will draw the attention and please the reader. First we are glad to publish the announcement, made at the Ada-Europe 2012 conference, of the winners of the Ada Way contest, a team from the University of Padua, Italy, formed by Ricardo Aguirre Reyes, Andrea Graziano, Marco Teoli, and Alberto Zuccato. We are glad that these students have also accepted our invitation, and provided to the Journal a report on the main design decisions and difficulties found in developing the simulator. The contest enters now a “try and beat me” challenge, where any team can attempt to improve over this reference implementation. We also continue the publication of the Ada 2012 Rationale, by John Barnes, with the chapter describing the changes in the tasking and real-time domain, of which possibly the most relevant is the mechanism to control the allocation of tasks on multiprocessors. The emergence and challenges of these architectures require that languages consider new ways to control and schedule tasks, in order to fully utilize the available parallel power. The Ada concurrency model has always been an important mark of the language and it is thus important that Ada continues to be in the forefront of concurrency, and now parallelism, support. Ada 2012 already incorporates some of these features, but more work is undoubtedly still necessary. And, although a coincidence, it is a pleasure that I note that this issue provides the announcement and call for papers for the next IRTAW; the 16th International Real-Time Ada Workshop will take place April 2013 in the beautiful scenery of York, in the UK. IRTAW is the main forum dedicated to the advances of Ada in the tasking and real-time domain and has provided many of the advances in this area in the language revisions. The issue also provides the position papers and summary for the two panels that took place in the Ada-Europe 2012 conference. The first of these, entitled “What is Language Technology in Our Time?”, addressed the increasingly important issue of a language needing an eco-system of frameworks and tools around it in order to reach out to prospective users. This panel was moderated by Tullio Vardanega, from the University of Padua, Italy, and included as panelists Bertrand Meyer, Eiffel Software, Switzerland; Franco Gasperoni, AdaCore, France; Erhard Plödereder, University of Stuttgart, Germany; and José María Martínez, Cassidian, Spain. This issue includes the position papers of moderator and panelists, as well as a summary of the panel discussion by Albert Llemosí, Universitat de les Illes Balears, Spain. The second panel, entitled “Reliable Software, a Perspective from Industry”, discussed the industrial perspective on the software technology for reliable software. It was moderated by Jørgen Bundgaard, Ada in Denmark, and included as panelists Ana Rodríguez, GMV, Spain; Steen Palm, Terma A/S, Denmark and Rick Sward, MITRE, USA. The issue provides their position papers as well as the summary of the panel by José Ruiz, AdaCore, France. Continuing with Ada-Europe 2013, we also publish a paper derived from its industrial track, from Frank Dordowsky (ESG, Germany) and Richard Bridges and Holger Tschöpe (Eurocopter, Germany), presenting the design of the I/O data interface of the NH90 software, using Ada generics. As usual, the issue also provides the News Digest and Calendar sections, by Jacob Sparre Andersen and Dirk Craeynest, their respective editors.