Using Ada for commercial software

Abstract

One of the principal concerns of the U .S . Department of Defense in sponsoring the design of Ada was that the new language should be suitable for use in embedded military computer systems. However, Ada's designers included many features which make the language especially useful for a much wider class of software projects--specifically, large-scale systems of programs. lntellimac 's experience over the past year with two such projects, a payroll system and a system of order--entry with inventory control, illustrates the great advantages of Ada for such standard commercial applications. I shall discuss our experiences with packages, strong typing, enumeration types , attributes, and exceptions.