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Ada 95

Ada is a general-purpose programming language which was originally commissioned by the U.S. Department of Defense in the late 1970s. The language definition was finally approved by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) in 1983 and also by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in 1987. The rules of these organisations require that standards be reviewed and resubmitted for validation every ten years, so in the late 1980s the revision effort began and a new version of Ada began to take shape. The new version of the language was originally referred to as Ada 9X, since it would be approved some time during the 1990s, and the original version of the language became known as Ada 83 (since it was originally approved in 1983). The standardisation of Ada 9X was finally completed in early 1995, so the official title of the language is now Ada 95.

Development tools:

	Versions of GNAT, a free Ada 95 compiler, for DOS/Windows 3.x and for Windows 95/NT
	A selection of GNAT development environments for DOS, Windows 3.x and Windows 95/NT
	An Ada-aware text editor

Tutorials and FAQs:

	Lovelace, an excellent on-line Ada tutorial by David Wheeler
	The Coronado Ada 95 tutorial. This is a shareware tutorial from Coronado Enterprises, so if you find it useful you should pay the author for his trouble. The examples it refers to need to be installed separately.
	The comp.lang.ada FAQ from the newsgroup comp.lang.ada
	The Learning Ada FAQ from the newsgroup comp.lang.ada
	The Ada Programming FAQ from the newsgroup comp.lang.ada
	The Object-Oriented FAQ
	The DJGPP FAQ, all about the DJGPP compiler

Reference materials:

	The Language Reference Manual (LRM), which is the official definition of the language
	The Ada 95 Rationale, which gives explanations of major language features and changes from Ada 83
	The Ada 95 Style Guide, which gives a set of guidelines for writing high-quality Ada programs

Software resources:

	Some Ada packages
	Examples from the book Ada 95: The Craft of Object-Oriented Programming by John English
	Examples from the book Object-Oriented Software in Ada 95 by my colleague Mike Smith

External resources:

	The Ada Home, the premier Ada website with links to a huge range of Ada resources
	The Public Ada Library, an FTP archive of Ada software and other material
	The Ada Information Clearinghouse, the primary archive for Ada documentation
	ACM SIGAda, the Association for Computing Machinery's Ada special interest group
	Ada-UK, the British Ada special interest group
	Ada Core Technologies, the home site for GNAT. The GNAT distributions are also mirrored at the University of Brighton.
	Learn Ada on the Web, Fintan Culwin's online tutorial at South Bank University in London
	Ada links at Yahoo (or at Yahoo UK)
	Cetus Object-Orientation Links
	The OO SoapBox
	The newsgroup comp.lang.ada