Dictionary.net

an enzyme found in mammals that can catalyze the deamination of adenosine into inosine and ammonia; "ADA deficiency can lead to one form of severe combined immunodeficiency disease"; "the gene encoding ADA was one of the earlier human genes to be isolated and cloned for study"

See Americans With Disabilities Act.

(After Ada Lovelace) A Pascal-descendedlanguage, designed by Jean Ichbiah's team at CII Honeywellin 1979, made mandatory for Department of Defense softwareprojects by the Pentagon. The original language wasstandardised as "Ada 83", the latest is "Ada 95".Ada is a large, complex, block-structured language aimedprimarily at embedded applications. It has facilities forreal-time response, concurrency, hardware access andreliable run-time error handling. In support of large-scalesoftware engineering, it emphasises strong typing, dataabstraction and encapsulation. The type system uses nameequivalence and includes both subtypes and derived types.Both fixed and floating-point numerical types are supported.Control flow is fully bracketed: if-then-elsif-end if,case-is-when-end case, loop-exit-end loop, goto. Subprogramparameters are in, out, or inout. Variables imported fromother packages may be hidden or directly visible. Operatorsmay be overloaded and so may enumeration literals. Thereare user-defined exceptions and exception handlers.An Ada program consists of a set of packages encapsulatingdata objects and their related operations. A package has aseparately compilable body and interface. Ada permitsgeneric packages and subroutines, possibly parametrised.Ada support single inheritance, using "tagged types" whichare types that can be extended via inheritance.Ada programming places a heavy emphasis on multitasking.Tasks are synchronised by the rendezvous, in which a taskwaits for one of its subroutines to be executed by another.The conditional entry makes it possible for a task to testwhether an entry is ready. The selective wait waits foreither of two entries or waits for a limited time.Ada is often criticised, especially for its size andcomplexity, and this is attributed to its having been designedby committee. In fact, both Ada 83 and Ada 95 were designedby small design teams to be internally consistent and tightlyintegrated. By contrast, two possible competitors, Fortran90 and C++ have both become products designed by large anddisparate volunteer committees.See also Ada/Ed, Toy/Ada.Home of the Brave Ada Programmers(http://lglwww.epfl.ch/Ada/). Ada FAQs(http://lglwww.epfl.ch/Ada/FAQ/) (hypertext), text only(ftp://lglftp.epfl.ch/pub/Ada/FAQ). (http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/languages/ada/), (ftp://ajpo.sei.cmu.edu/), (ftp://stars.rosslyn.unisys.com/pub/ACE_8.0).E-mail: .Usenet newsgroup: news:comp.lang.ada.An Ada grammar (ftp://primost.cs.wisc.edu/) including a lexscanner and yacc parser is available. E-mail:.Another yacc grammar and parser for Ada by Herman Fischer(ftp://wsmr-simtel20.army.mil/PD2:GRAM2.SRC).An LR parser and pretty-printer for Ada from NASA isavailable from the Ada Software Repository.Adamakegen generates makefiles for Ada programs.["Reference Manual for the Ada Programming Language", ANSI/MILSTD 1815A, US DoD (Jan 1983)]. Earlier draft versionsappeared in July 1980 and July 1982. ISO 1987.