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Modern society is becoming very dependent upon software. Our transport systems, financial systems, medical systems and defense systems all depend to a very large degree upon software. As a consequence the safety of many human lives and much property now depends upon the reliable functioning of software. Moreover, the fall in the cost of hardware has now made possible the development of large software systems.

Ada is a programming language of special value in the development of large programs which must work reliably. This applies to most defense applications (from which background Ada evolved) and extends to many application domains. Indeed over half the Ada programs now being developed are for non-defense applications.

This document describes the rationale for Ada 95, the revised International Standard. Ada 95 increases the flexibility of Ada thus making it applicable to wider domains but retains the inherent reliability for which Ada has become noted. Important aspects of Ada 95 include

* Object Oriented Programming. Ada 95 includes full OOP facilities giving the flexibility of programming by extension which enables programs to be extended and maintained at lower cost.
* Hierarchical Libraries. The library mechanism now takes a hierarchical form which is valuable for the control and decomposition of large programs.
* Protected Objects. The tasking features of Ada are enhanced to incorporate a very efficient mechanism for multitask synchronized access to shared data. This is of special value for hard realtime systems.

These enhancements to Ada make Ada 95 an outstanding language. It adds the flexibility of languages such as C++ to the reliable Software Engineering framework provided and proven by Ada 83 over the past ten years.

Ada 95 is a natural evolution of Ada 83. The enhancements have been made without disturbing the existing investment in Ada 83 programs and programmers. Upward compatibility has been a prime goal and has been achieved within the constraints imposed by other requirements.

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