Modern society is becoming very dependent upon software. Our transport systems, financial systems, medical systems and defense systems all depend to a very large degree upon software. As a consequence the safety of many human lives and much property now depends upon the reliable functioning of software. Moreover, the fall in the cost of hardware has now made possible the development of large software systems.

Ada is a programming language of special value in the development of large programs which must work reliably. [...] Ada is a modern programming language suitable for those application areas which benefit from the discipline of organized development, that is, Software Engineering; it is a general purpose language with special applicability to real-time and embedded systems. [...]

Although Ada was originally designed to provide a single flexible yet portable language for real-time embedded systems to meet the needs of the US DoD, its domain of application has expanded to include many other areas, such as large-scale information systems, distributed systems, scientific computation, and systems programming. Furthermore, its user base has expanded to include all major defense agencies of the Western world, the whole of the aerospace community and increasingly many areas in civil and private sectors such as telecommunications, process control and monitoring systems. Indeed, the expansion in the civil sector is such that civil applications now generate the dominant revenues of many vendors.

(from "Ada 95 Rationale: The Language, The Standard Libraries", John Barnes (ed.), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 1247, Springer-Verlag, 1997, ISBN 3-540-63143-7)

This Fall, Ada-Belgium will run a course teaching Ada 95, at the premises of the U.L.B. in Brussels, bi-weekly on Wednesday evenings, starting on September 23, 1998.

Highlights

• The course will be modular: you may skip modules discussing subjects you already know about without losing the thread of the course. The first module will be an introduction to Ada for programmers in other languages. After this the modules will be of interest to both newcomers to Ada and those already working in Ada 83 who wish to learn Ada 95.

• The course will take the form of evening sessions every two weeks. There will be small exercises during the evening sessions and larger exercises which may be completed between sessions. Ada compilers will be available for the completion of these exercises.

• The course will be taught in English. Everyone interested is welcome.

Here you will find:

• the full programme,
• abstracts of the modules,
• free Ada CD-ROMs for Ada-Belgium members,
• documentation that will be handed out,
• the location of the course,
• registration,
• the course secretariat,
• acknowledgements.

This free Ada 95 course is an opportunity not to be missed! Do not delay to register!

Looking forward to meet many of you in Brussels.

Dirk Craeynest
Ada-Belgium Board
ada-belgium-board@cs.kuleuven.ac.be

Programme

Wed 23 Sep 1998 - Introduction to Ada - part 1
Wed  7 Oct 1998 - Introduction to Ada - part 2

Wed 21 Oct 1998 - Object-Oriented Programming in Ada - part 1
Wed  4 Nov 1998 - Object-Oriented Programming in Ada - part 2

Wed 18 Nov 1998 - Parallel Programming in Ada

Fri  4 Dec 1998 - 8th Annual Ada-Belgium Seminar
  (a full day event, with a.o. invited speakers and project
  presentations; theme: parallelism, tasking, real-time, etc.;
  separate registration is required)

Wed 16 Dec 1998 - Distributed Programming in Ada

Abstracts

"Introduction to Ada"
Marc Gobin, Royal Military Academy, Brussel

The introductory course will cover most of the core language, except for the material covered in the subsequent modules, such as object oriented features and tasking.
The course will essentially be taught as a sequence of simple programs showing common aspects of programming in Ada.
We will first walk to the simple predefined types and see how declarations are controlled.
The power of Ada conditional statements and loop statements will be illustrated. The introduction of new types and subtypes will be explained, including arrays, records and pointers.
Procedures and functions will than be introduced, first embedded in the program itself and than defined outside a program ready to be used by as many programs as needed. This means the introduction of packages and exceptions.
The power of generic units will be shown and we will discuss the input output possibilities of the predefined packages Ada.Text_Io, Ada.Sequential_Io and Ada.Direct_Io.

References

• John Barnes: "Programming in Ada95, 2nd edition" (Addison Wesley)
• Michael Feldman: "Software Construction and Data structures with Ada95" (Addison Wesley)
• Michael Feldman & Koffman: "Ada95, Problem solving and program design" (Addison Wesley)
• Ada 95 Reference Manual (Springer Verlag)
• Ada 95 Rationale (Springer Verlag)
• Ada 95 Style Guide (Springer Verlag)

"Object-Oriented Programming in Ada"
Luc Bernard, OFFIS nv/sa, Zaventem

One of the major contributions of the 95 version of the Ada language is certainly the way it addresses Object-Oriented Design and Development.

The two sessions will present how OO concepts have been added to the language on top of existing ones (types, derivations, etc...). No particular knowledge of OO is required to follow these sessions since the basic concepts will be briefly presented.

"Parallel Programming in Ada"
Raymond Devillers, U.L.B., Bruxelles

Many more programmers are having to work in multi-threaded environments today: most modern operating systems support threads (or light-weight processes) to some extent. The problem with threads is that they are not standard and so are not portable. Every operating system has a differing set of application programmers' interfaces (APIs) and frequently differing scheduling and priority rules. Thread programming is also notoriously difficult to manage in C and difficult to encapsulate in C++. Neither C nor C++ provides any support for important issues in multi-threaded programming features such as re-entrant functions and interprocess communication (IPC).

Unlike C++ Ada defines a model for concurrent programming as part of the language itself. Few other languages (Occam and Java are examples) provide language level concurrency; other languages (Modula-3) provide a concurrency model through the use of standard library abstractions. In Ada there are two base components: the task which encapsulates a concurrent process, and the protected type, which is a data structure that provides guarded access to its data. These features can be used to develop responsive, high-performance applications utilizing one of the few truly cross-platform models for concurrent processing.

The real-time systems annex provides additional facilities for programming in either a hard or a soft real-time environment. The main thrust of this annex is to provide programmers of real-time systems with an environment which provides fixed, predictable scheduling of tasks and interrupts within an application.

(from "Ada 95 for C and C++ Programmers", Simon Johnston, Addison Wesley Longman, 1997, ISBN 0-201-40363-3)

"Distributed Programming in Ada"
Yolande Berbers, K.U.Leuven, Leuven

As presented at the Ada-Belgium'97 Seminar on Developing Distributed Applications, several different approaches are available. The most important ones are using CORBA or the Ada 95 distributed systems annex (or both).

The Ada 95 programming language is a powerful and flexible language that provides a safe environment for creating reliable software. The OMG Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is a flexible environment for creating potentially distributed software components. The marriage of these two technologies results in a uniquely powerful environment for creating high performance, reliable, distributed software components.

(from "Ada-Belgium'97 - Call for Participation", Ada-Belgium, 1997)

Ada 95 is the first general-purpose language to provide a standard distributed programming paradigm. By combining the distributed and object-oriented features of Ada 95, it is possible to create an application where objects are physically distributed over a network of machines, without having to interface to any low-level communication layer. Likewise, by combining the distributed and real-time capabilities of Ada 95, it is possible to design applications which meet real-time constraints in a distributed environment.

GNAT, and more specifically GLADE (GNAT Library for Ada Distributed Execution), is the first commercial implementation of the distributed Ada 95 programming model. This implementation allows a distributed application to run on a network of heterogeneous machines, to support different network protocols, and to provide replication and fault-tolerance.

(from "GLADE - Distributed systems in Ada 95", ACT Europe, 1998)

Contents of this session:

• Strategies to program distributed applications
• Ada 95 distributed system annex overview
• Categorization pragmas: definitions and examples
• GNATDIST: Configuration tool and language
• GARLIC: PCS and its extended services

Free Ada CD-ROMs for Ada-Belgium members

We still have a small number of another CD-ROM for those direct Ada-Belgium members (first-come first-served) that couldn't attend the Ada-Belgium'97 Seminar end of last year. CCI (Competence Center Informatik GmbH) provided copies of the Ada-Tour Version 2.0i CD-ROM for distribution at the seminar. This Ada-Tour offers an extensive introduction to Ada 95 and is targeted to people wanting to find out more about the language, its foundations and possibilities. More information is available on the CCI Web-pages (in German).

Documentation

We will try to provide copies of the presentations at each course session.

In addition, we still have a small number of documentation sets of the Ada-Belgium'97 Seminar on Developing Distributed Applications for direct members not attending the seminar (as availability permits). This set contains, a.o., a printed copy of the CORBA IDL to Ada 95 mapping document, thanks to the assistance of DG XII at the European Commission, printed proceedings with papers related to the presentations, copies of slides, and additional documents and papers.

Location

• Place:
  Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB)
  Boulevard du Triomphe
  Campus de la Plaine
  1050 Brussels

• Room:
  "Salle des Professeurs", building NO, 9th level, room NO.9.06.
  From session 3 on, due to the large interest: same building NO, 5th level, room NO5.07 (close to elevators). From session 5 on, due to room scheduling constraints, again in room NO.9.06.

• Time:
  19:00 - 22:00 (including break)

Registration

Please return the Registration Form as soon as possible.

As mentioned above, for direct Ada-Belgium members registration includes the option to receive a free copy of the latest edition of the Walnut Creek double Ada CD-ROM (April 1998), containing a.o. the current editions of two Ada 95 compilers: the public GNAT distribution from ACT, for lots of platforms, and the ObjectAda Special Edition from Aonix, for Windows 95 and NT.

A limited supply of additional material that was distributed at the Ada-Belgium'97 Seminar is also available for direct members on their request (see above and registration form).

Others registering for (a) course module(s) can optionally become Ada-Belgium members, and hence also receive the free CD-ROMs and documentation.

Course Secretariat

Ada-Belgium Secretariat
Attn. Prof. R. Devillers
c/o Université Libre de Bruxelles (U.L.B.)
Boulevard du Triomphe / Triomflaan
Campus de la Plaine, CP 212, B-1050 Brussels
Phone (32)-2-650.56.11, Fax (32)-2-650.56.09
E-mail: ada-belgium-board@cs.kuleuven.ac.be

To the Ada-Belgium home page. To the Ada Course Home Page.

Last update: 1998/12/15.