Ada-95: A guide for C and C++ programmers

This document is written primarily for C and C++ programmers and is set out to describe the Ada programming language in a way more accessible to them. I have used the standard Ada documentation conventions, code will look like this and the keywords will look like this. I will include references to the Ada Reference Manual in braces and in italics, which denotes the section. The ARM is reference 1 at the end of this document. Another useful reference is the Lovelace on-line tutorial which is a great way to pick up Ada basics.

I will start out by describing the Ada predefined types, and the complex types, and move onto the simple language constructs. Section 2 will start to introduce some very Ada specific topics and section 3 describes the new Ada-95 Object Oriented programming constructs. Section 5 describes the Ada tools for managing concurrency, the task and protected types, these are worth investing some time getting to grips with. Section 6 is a tour of the Ada IO library and covers some of the differences in concept and implementation between it and C stdio.

Please feel free to comment on errors, things you don’t like and things you would like to see. If I don’t get the comments then I can’t take it forward, and the question you would like answered is almost certainly causing other people problems too.

If you are new to Ada and do not have an Ada compiler handy then why not try the GNAT Ada compiler. This compiler is based on the well known GCC C/C++ and Objective-C compiler and provides a high quality Ada-83 and Ada-95 compiler for many platforms. Here is the FTP site (ftp: //cs.nyu.edu/pub/gnat) see if there is one for you.