Ada was originally targeted at embedded and real-time systems. The Ada 95 revision, designed by S. Tucker Taft of Intermetrics between 1992 and 1995, improved support for systems, numerical, financial, and object-oriented programming (OOP). Notable features of Ada include: strong typing, modularity mechanisms (packages), run-time checking, parallel processing (tasks), exception handling, and generics. Ada 95 added support for object-oriented programming, including dynamic dispatch. Ada supports run-time checks in order to protect against access to unallocated memory, buffer overflow errors, off-by-one errors, array access errors, and other detectable bugs. These checks can be disabled in the interest of runtime efficiency, but can often be compiled efficiently. It also includes facilities to help program verification. For these reasons, Ada is widely used in critical systems, where any anomaly might lead to very serious consequences, i.e., accidental death or injury. Examples of systems where Ada is used include avionics, weapon systems (including thermonuclear weapons), and spacecraft. Ada also supports a large number of compile-time checks to help avoid bugs that would not be detectable until run-time in some other languages or would require explicit checks to be added to the source code. Ada is designed to detect small problems in very large software systems. For example, Ada detects each misspelled variable (due to the rule to declare each variable name), and Ada pinpoints unclosed if-statements, which require "END IF" rather than mismatching with any "END" token. Also, Ada can spot procedure calls with incorrect parameters, which is a common problem in large, complex software where most of the statements are procedure calls. Ada's dynamic memory management is high-level and type-explicit, requiring explicit instantiation of the Unchecked_Deallocation package to explicitly free allocated memory. The specification does not require any particular implementation. Though the semantics of the language allow automatic garbage collection of inaccessible objects, most implementations do not support it. Ada does support a limited form of region-based storage management. Invalid accesses can always be detected at run time (unless of course the check is turned off) and sometimes at compile time. The syntax of Ada is simple, consistent and readable. It minimizes choices of ways to perform basic operations, and prefers English keywords (eg "or else") to symbols (eg. "||"). Ada uses the basic mathematical symbols (i.e.: "+", "-", "*" and "/") for basic mathematical operations but avoids using other symbols. Code blocks are delimited by words such as "declare", "begin" and "end". Conditional statements are closed with "end if", avoiding a dangling else that could pair with the wrong nested if-expression in other languages. Ada was designed to use the English language standard for comments: the em-dash, as a double-dash ("--") to denote comment text. Comments stop at end of line, so there is no danger of unclosed comments accidentally eating whole sections of source code. Comments can be nested: prefixing each line (or column) with "--" will skip all that code, while being clearly denoted as a column of repeated "--" down the page. There is no limit to the nesting of comments, thereby allowing prior code, with commented-out sections, to be commented-out as even larger sections. All Unicode characters are allowed in comments, such as for symbolic formulas (E[0]=m?c?). To the compiler, the double-dash is treated as end-of-line, allowing continued parsing of the language as a context-free grammar. The semicolon (";") is a statement terminator, and the null or no-operation statement is null;. A single ; without a statement to terminate is not allowed. This allows for a better quality of error messages. Code for complex systems is typically maintained for many years, by programmers other than the original author. It can be argued that these language design principles apply to most software projects, and most phases of software development, but when applied to complex, safety critical projects, benefits in correctness, reliability, and maintainability take precedence over (arguable) costs in initial development. Unlike most ISO standards, the Ada language definition (known as the Ada Reference Manual or ARM, or sometimes the Language Reference Manual or LRM) is free content. Thus, it is a common reference for Ada programmers and not just programmers implementing Ada compilers. Apart from the reference manual, there is also an extensive rationale document which explains the language design and the use of various language constructs. This document is also widely used by programmers. When the language was revised, a new rationale document was written. One notable Free Software tool that is used by many Ada programmers to aid them in writing Ada source code is GPS, the GNAT Programming Studio.
