Ada and A Sharp Programming Language

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The programming arena, is a very serious area of study, and unless you are serious about your programming skills, you will never be able to create that state of the art application that you would like to develop, because you are not training yourself the right way to achieve your goals.

Working hard should also not be foreign to you, meaning that you should not be afraid of staying up at all kinds of time during the night, to be able to accomplish your goals. Another thing you should keep in mind is that, when you are developing your application, remember that, you are creating a system and within that system, a way of thinking is being developed, which may change the world forever.

So think about how you would like, your users to think after they have used your application or visited your website.

You should also keep in mind that you should never stop, learning a new programming language, because the more programming languages you know, the more able you will be, to take over the programming industry, which is an extremely difficult thing to do, of course.

In today’s article we are going to be talking about “A Sharp”, a .NET programming language, which is a port for Ada to the Microsoft .NET platform, for their operating system purpose. A# was specifically developed to be the port of Ada to the Microsoft .NET platform.

We are going to talk mostly about Ada, more than A sharp to get you started on your programming ambitions. The Department of Computer Science in the United States Air Force Academy, originally developed this programming language.

A# is distributed, as a service to the Ada community for free, under the terms of the GNU, general public license. The leading open source integrated development environment (IDE) for Ada, is AdaGIDE, which has been fully integrated with A#.

The implementation of this particular language have to be done right, with the right tools, before you can even begin to write any code with “A sharp”. Let’s bring our focus on Ada for a moment, according to the information found about Ada, this programming language, has a built in feature, which supports structured, generic, distributed, concurrent and object-oriented programming directly.

If you are involved, in Rapid Application Development, Extreme Programming (XP) and Free Software development, then Ada is a good choice of programming language.

Good software engineering practices, which can help you build very large, software systems that, involves millions of lines of code, and a very large development team, are very well supported by Ada.

When Ada is chosen to write code, the programmer is able to construct powerful abstractions, which reflect the real world and bring real value to customers, because Ada is an extremely strong, static and safe type system.

As a programmer, you also won’t have to deal with many or any bugs, because Ada is able to detect many logical errors, before they become annoying bugs, which can ruin your whole day and make your programming experience with Ada a living hell. Once your programming experience with any programming language, is a living hell, then you won’t want to be that great programmer, which you are intending to be.

Ada is also very easy to read, favoring the reader of the code, rather than then the writer of the code, so if you wrote code for an application using Ada, and didn’t write any comments for yourself within the code, you won’t have a hard time, if you were to leave your code alone for about a month or two. You will be able to read your code clearly, and will not be lost in the mist of your own code.

Ada can also be portable, across hardware and operating systems, and your Ada code can be recompiled on any system, without having to make any changes.

The reason why Ada is very portable, is because this programming language, only allows compilers across platforms, to differ only in a few controlled ways, meaning that there are not many difference within Ada, when it is being deployed into any platform. Ada is a standard programming language, which has been standardized since, the late 1970’s.

Ada is used heavily in many life critical applications, such as aerospace, government military defense, medical railroads and the nuclear industry. Ada has powerful specialized features, which support low level programming for real time, safe-critical and embedded systems. Ada is reliable, reusable and maintainable, due to its standards, which continue to be upgraded, year after year.

Also, you will find that, you can maintain your software easily with Ada, which will allow you to save some, time money and effort. Ada has many good and special features, which you can use for low-level programming and embedded systems, also the good software engineering practices of Ada, will help your programming with general purpose programming language.

Bit manipulation, low-level access to memory, control over bitwise representation of data as well as well-defined computer model and machine code insertion, are some of the features, you’ll find within Ada. You are also given the ability, within Ada, to include or exclude some of the programming language’s features.

In certified, life critical applications, Ada compilers are supported by minimal run-time kernels. Some Ada programs, though are written with no run-time kernel, to save time, during execution. Industries such as the aerospace, the defense, the railroad, medicine and nuclear, all use Ada heavily for this purpose. The programming language’s compilers are tested as well, before they are used for military and commercial work.

Ada is one of the few languages, which has to go through testing, before it can be used, because this programming language is used for, critical and life threatening situations because it is very reliable.

All of Ada compilers behave almost the same, because they are tested for the same purpose. It is a good thing that compilers in Ada behave the same, because you won’t have to learn anything new, when you go from one computer or computing device to another, to fire up your Ada programming. So far, we have learned how unique, the Ada programming language is, and its features, which makes it very suitable for companies within the military, medical, transportation and commercial industry.

Next we’ll talk about Ada’s syntax, which can help us to better understand this programming language, as far as how it is helping many commercial and military companies in the world.

We should note though, that programming in any language, can be extremely difficult and you have to always seek information in many places to bring your coding skills, up to speed. We are going to use the famous “Hello World” program, to help you understand the syntax of Ada, a bit better.

Programming an application, can and will become a daunting task, and unless you are prepared, to go through many obstacles, and many headaches, you won’t be able to, develop your application. You also have to be able to follow what we call the application life cycle, which will allow you to properly develop your code. E

The following lines of code, is a very good example of the famous “Hello World”, which you would be seen, during your development as a programmer.

File name: hello_world_v0.adb

with Ada.Text_IO

procedure Hello is

begin

Ada.Text_IO.Put_Line(“Hello, world!”);

end Hello;

Alright, let’s explain the piece of code, you just read above, so that you have an idea, of how the Ada programming language works.

First of all, you see the, “with” statement, which the program uses to receive the Ada.Text_IO package. The package includes every Ada compiler, as well as all the functionalities of the compiler.

The program above, is able to produce “Hello”, because the “with” statement makes the Ada.Text_IO package’s declarations available, to the program.

The “Hello” word you see up there, is the main procedure of Ada to execute; due to the fact that Ada, allows you to name the main procedure, by any name you choose, on the piece of code above, we use “Hello” as the name for the main procedure, because it is the “Hello World” program.

The programmer has availble to them everything, which is declared for public use, in the Ada.Text_IO package, such as types declared in the AdaText_IO and the subprograms of the Ada.Text_IO, when you decide to program with Ada and include this package.

Another famous package is the Text_IO of Ada, which provides a collection of tools, which are specifically used, in one easy-to-access module, for textual input and output.

All Ada compilers contain the Ada.Text_IO, so that they make available all the things, which you would use for textual Input/Output, within the code you write for your application. All the declarations of Ada, that you are able to use, which include any package as well as types, are declared with the “with” statement of Ada. You may also find, that an Ada program is using the clause “use”, which makes visible, the contents of a package.

The packages, that are mostly used, would be using the clause “use”, as a rule of thumb. Ada compilers, would, in general, create the best code possible, which can be optimized for use.

The system does not work out of the box, because this system is geared to not frighten away potential users and give programmers a bit of a challenge to set up your Ada, development environment. If you are a beginner with Ada, there are certain things, which you need to pay attention to, if you want to have any kind of success with your Ada coding.

Such things that you need to pay attention to are: type and subtype, in Ada, there is a difference, between type and subtype; if a type is given by a set of values, then it is known as type; however, if it is given by type and a constraint that limits the set of values, then this is known as a subtype.

You will also encounter, constrained types and unconstrained types, which are also different. In a constraint type you will see that, this type has a fixed value for its parameters, thus controlling its own size and shape, while the unconstrained type has free parameters, which affects its size and shape. You will also encounter, dynamic types, which defines certain values as dynamic, where it would have been static in Pascal or C, such as the subscripts bounds of an array.

This is are some of the things which you need to watch out for if you don’t want to have a hard time, programming with the Ada programming language, you still need to more research and search out the secrets of Ada. We have only touched the surface of this great programming language called Ada, however, it is up to you, to continue to do your research so that you can have this technology under your belt.

We also didn’t talk much about A#, which is not as different of a programming language from Ada, it is instead a close family of Ada, because they complement each other in Windows programming. The piece of code you read above, is also very basic, which means that you will need to formulate your own complex code, to be able to develop your application using the Ada programming language.

Also if you are not a Windows programmer though, then you don’t need to worry about anything we just said here, we would have to talk about Ada and A# for other platforms in other article posts, but you didn’t waste your time, because we did cover some feature of Ada that can be applied across many operating systems. We assume during our conversation that you are a Windows programmer and so we focused on features of Ada mostly found in Windows.

The journey, to becoming a great programmer, is never easy, but someone has to do it, and I am willing to bet that you want to become, that great programmer. However, you must be willing to pay the price, and fight the obstacles, that you would have to face along the way, in order for you to become that great programmer.

Thank you for reading this article!!!

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Hernando Cadet

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