Adapting Ada distribution and fault tolerance

Abstract

During the Third International Real Time Ada Workshop held at Nemacolin Woodlands, Pennsylvania, in June 1989, the present authors formed a study group to review the changes in the Ada standard which would make the language more suitable for programming distributed systems. It was accepted that one of the important advantages of distributing embedded systems was the potential for recovery from partial failure of hardware, and that the techniques of programming recovery from such failure were not well supported by the current form of Ada. The working group made specific proposals, which have since been refined at a further meeting and discussions by electronic mail. The present paper reviews the causes of difficulty, and then outlines the new proposals, explaining their rationale in relation to the identified requirements.