We are pleased to announce the release of GNAT GPL 2009, the Ada Toolset for Academic users and FLOSS developers. It introduces many new features including:

- Ability to generate byte code for the JVM

- Improved support for the .NET Framework

- Addition of the Ada-Java Interfacing Suite (AJIS) that enables native Ada code to be called from Java:
http://www.adacore.com/2008/06/17/ada-java_interfacing_suite

- Availability on the Mac OS X (64 bit) platform

- Automatic C/C++ binding generators

- Addition of the GNAT Component Collection (GNATcoll) providing new APIs that can be extended by the user community:
http://www.adacore.com/2008/06/17/gnat_component_collection

GNAT GPL 2009 comes with version 4.3.1 of the GNAT Programming Studio IDE and GNATbench 2.3, the GNAT plug-in for Eclipse.

It is available for the GNU Linux, Mac OS X (64 bit), .NET, JVM and Windows platforms.

GNAT GPL 2009 can be downloaded from the “Download” section on the new Libre website:
https://libre.adacore.com.

I wonder if the new JVM bytecode generation feature was frequently requested by Ada developers, or is just a move towards popularizing Ada as a highly capable programming language. Either way, it’s good.

Hopefully, I will find time and a matching project to finally learn Ada properly – since a couple of years I believe Ada is a very good programming language. And the D language is better than C and C++ (holy war, anyone? )

We are pleased to announce the release of GNAT GPL 2008, the Ada Toolset for Academic users and FLOSS developers.

It introduces hundreds of enhancements including:

• Availability on the Windows .NET platform
• Upgrade of the debugging engine
• Improvement in robustness and efficiency for Ada 2005 features
• Many new warnings & restrictions to help programmers detect errors earlier
• Companion tools such as gprof, gcov, gnatcheck, gnatpp and gnatmetric are being enhanced to support a wider variety of needs, coding styles, and coding standards
• Support for Pre/Post conditions

GNAT GPL 2008 comes with version 4.2.1 of the GNAT Programming Studio IDE and GNATbench 2.1, the GNAT plug-in for Eclipse.

It is available on the GNU Linux (32 and 64 bit), .NET, and Windows platforms.

GNAT GPL 2008 can be downloaded from the “Download GNAT GPL Edition” section on https://libre.adacore.com/

AdaCore is pleased to announce the launch of the new Ada Gems series. The Gems will cover a wide-range of Ada programming topics and will often include executable source code and other related resources to help understand and discover the Ada programming language. The first Gem, written by Bob Duff entitled “Limited Aggregates in Ada 2005”, is available at:

adacore.com/category/developers-center/gems

Note: the excerpt is taken from this chapter, with copyrights belonging to respective authors.

Here is the Ada types hierarchy (click for larger image):

Four principles govern the type system:

• Strong typing: types are incompatible with one another, so it is not possible to mix apples and oranges. There are, however, ways to convert between types.
• Static typing: the programmer must declare the type of all objects, so that the compiler can check them. This is in contrast to dynamically typed languages such as Python, Smalltalk, or Lisp. Also, there is no type inference like in OCaml.
• Abstraction: types represent the real world or the problem at hand; not how the computer represents the data internally. There are ways to specify exactly how a type must be represented at the bit level, but we will defer that discussion to another chapter.
• Name equivalence, as opposed to structural equivalence used in most other languages. Two types are compatible if and only if they have the same name; not if they just happen to have the same size or bit representation. You can thus declare two integer types with the same ranges that are totally incompatible, or two record types with the exact same components, but which are incompatible.

There are predefined types in the Standard package:

• Integer, includes Natural and Positive subtypes:
  
• Float
• Duration (fixed-point type specifically for timing)
• Character (8, 16, and 32-bit)
• String (and Wide_String)
• Boolean

There are also some types useful for low-level programming, defined in packages System and System.Storage_Elements.

I already have some (minor) knowledge in Ada, and read some books/tutorials. I had only started reading the above-mentioned book, but from the very “Basics” I liked the narration and details provided (e.g., I do not recollect encountering the renaming of packages as a short-cut used instead of ‘use’ing packages).

If the book continues in at least the same style, depth and examples enrichment, then I can recommend this book for those who want to study/refresh the Ada Programming knowledge and skills.

It is from this book that I learned that GNAT “is the only Ada compiler that supports all of the optional annexes of the language standard”.