PLNews: Programming Language News

It has been announced that videos from the Ada UK Conference 2007 are now available online.

The ACM SIGAda 2008 International Conference has put out a call for technical contributions.

The submission deadline is May 12, 2008. The conference will be held from October 26 to 30, 2008, in Portland, Oregon.

AdaCore GNAT Pro 6.0.1 has been released. GNAT Pro includes a full Ada compiler supporting Ada 83, Ada 95, and Ada 2005.

This release includes support for Ada 2005, plus other changes.

The ACM SIGAda 2007 International Conference has put out a call for participation. "This conference focuses on safety, security and high reliability systems and the issues related to their development. Topics such as applied software engineering principles, conforming to specific safety or security standards, testing philosophies, programming language selection, etc. will be discussed."

The conference will be held from November 4 to 8, 2007, in Washington, DC.

Dr. Jean Ichbiah, the chief designer of Ada, passed away on January 26, 2007. More information is available in his obituary in the Boston Globe.

SPARK Release 7.4 (~85 KB .pdf) has been released. "SPARK is a high level programming language and toolset designed for writing software for high integrity applications." It is based on a subset of Ada.

This release includes: language support for an 'accept' annotation, the allowance for obsolete floating-point attributes from Ada 83 in SPARK 95 mode, the 'Always_Valid assertion, user manual changes, plus other changes.

A call for nominations has been put out for the 2006 ACM SIGAda Awards. The awards will be presented on November 15, 2006, at the SIGAda 2006 conference being held in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

It has been announced (~75 KB .pdf) that the technical work on the Ada 2005 standard has been completed. Formal ISO approval is expected to be completed in November 2006.

Some of the new features and enhancements of Ada 2005 include: support for enhanced Java-like interfaces, support for 'object.operator' syntax, real-time system support improvements, and more.

AVR-Ada V0.4.1 has been released. It is a GCC-based Ada compiler targeting AVR microcontrollers.

This release includes: limited support for atmega2560 and atmega2561 devices, plus other changes and fixes.

AVR-Ada V0.4.0 has been released. It is a GCC-based Ada compiler targeting AVR microcontrollers.

This release includes: support for new devices, the building of part-specific runtime systems, support for gcc-3.4.6 and gcc-4.1.0, plus other changes and fixes.

It has been announced that the "Rationale for Ada 2005", by John Barnes, is now available online. It provides "an overview of Ada 2005 features, examples of their use, compatibility with Ada 95, and more."

It is currently available in HTML and PDF, with plans for an eventual single-volume formal publication.

The Ada UK Conference 2006 has been announced. The focus will be on the Ada 2005 standard, with the conference being held on March 28, 2006, in Manchester, England.

BYTE.com is running an article entitled "Ada and the Language Renaissance" (registration required), by Shannon Cochran.

The article introduces Ada, and proceeds to discuss some of the recent developments in the Ada community. The development of the Ada 2005 standard is mentioned, as are the enhancements to the AdaCore GNAT Pro development environment and the release of Aonix's AonixADT plug-in for Eclipse.

Aonix ObjectAda 8.2 has been released. It is an Ada 95 development system capable of emitting Java bytecode and native code, supporting Windows, Linux, UNIX and embedded/real-time systems development.

This release adds the new AonixADT plug-in for Eclipse,

It has been announced that the GNAT GPL 2005 Edition will be available in September. GNAT is an Ada implementation based on GCC.

This release will support many Ada 2005 features, such as abstract interface types, Object.operation notation, prevention of accidental overloading when overriding, nested type extensions, support for 16-bit and 32-bit characters, container library support, in addition to other new language and standard library features.

Peter Kitson has announced that a number of authors have allowed for their books on Ada 95 to be made available online.

Included are Ada 95 : The Craft of Object Oriented Programming by John English, Ada 95 Distilled by Richard Riehle, Object-Oriented Programming in Ada 95 by Michael A. Smith, Introducing Ada 95 by John Barnes, Ada 95 Language Reference Manual by The MITRE Corp., Inc., and Ada 95 Rationale: The Language, The Standard Libraries by Intermetrics, Inc.

AVR-Ada V0.3 has been released. It is a GCC-based Ada compiler targetting AVR microcontrollers.

This release includes new part description spec files, changes to the syntax for accessing single bits, a couple of AVR.IO routine renamings, new packages for string handling and accessing constants in program space, plus other improvements.