Ada in concert

Abstract

In a concert, it is truly marvelous how a diverse group of musicians playing an assortment of musical instruments come together to produce beautiful music. A point that is frequently made by those familiar with the new Ada standard, referred to here as Ada(95), is how the features in Ada(95) come together to enhance the software development process. This paper contains several examples that illustrate how the new features in Ada(95) dramatically improve the correlation between the design of a solution and its eventual implementation at the source code level when compared to Ada(83).The example, binary tree packaging, illustrates the design and implementation of recursive data structures. A data structure is recursive if the structure contains one or more substructures of the type being defined. As a result, recursive data structures lend themselves to processing with recursive algorithms. Lists, binary trees, and n-ary trees are examples of data structures that may be defined recursively. The example presented here is a package that implements binary trees using a recursive paradigm. The paper compares an Ada 83 solution with a solution using Ada 95. The paper focuses on how Ada 95 allows us to create a solution that more closely mirrors the specifications for the recursive data structure with improved time, space, and coding efficiency over an Ada 83 implementation. In a sense, this paper provides one illustration of how the '95 standard improves Ada.