This overview of Ada 2005 should have given the reader an appreciation of the important new features in Ada 2005. Some quite promising features failed to be included partly because the need for them was not clear and also because a conclusive design proved elusive. We might think of them as Forthcoming Attractions for any further revision!

Some esoteric topics have been omitted in this overview; they concern features such as: streams, object factory functions, the partition control system in distributed systems, partition elaboration policy for high integrity systems, a subtlety regarding overload resolution, the title of Annex H, quirks of access subtypes, rules for pragma Pure, and the classification of various units as pure or preelaborable.

The remaining chapters will expand on the six major topics of this overview in more detail.

It is worth briefly reviewing the guidelines (see Section 1.2 above) to see whether Ada 2005 meets them. Certainly the Ravenscar profile has been added and the problem of mutually dependent types across packages has been solved.

The group A items were about real-time and high-integrity, static error checking and interfacing. Clearly there are major improvements in the real-time area. And high-integrity and static error checking are addressed by features such as the overriding prefix, various pragmas such as Unsuppress and Assert and additional Restrictions identifiers. Better interfacing is provided by the pragma Unchecked_Union and the Mod attribute.

The group B items were about improvements to the OO model, the need for a Java-like interface feature and better interfacing to other OO languages. Major improvements to the OO model are brought by the prefixed (Obj.Op) notation and more flexible access types. The Java-like interface feature has been added and this provides better interfacing.

The final direct instruction was to incorporate the vectors and matrices stuff and this has been done. There are also many other improvements to the predefined library as we have seen.

It seems clear from this brief check that indeed Ada 2005 does meet the objectives set for it.

© 2005, 2006 John Barnes Informatics.

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