Welcome to the WWW-pages of Ada-Belgium

Ada -- The Language for a Complex World
Ada -- When your software absolutely has to work
Ada 95 -- The new Standard for Reliability
Ada 95 -- The First Internationally Standardized Fully Object-Oriented Programming Language

The purpose of Ada-Belgium is to be a forum for persons and organizations interested in the Ada programming language, in its applications and in Ada related technologies such as software engineering methods, environments and tools.

(If you don't know what Ada is, read this .)

Ada-Belgium activities

Organization of an annual one-day seminar. The 1994 Ada-Belgium Seminar was held on November 23rd, 1994, in Brussels. The 1995 seminar will be held in Q4, probably again in or near Brussels.
Organization of an annual General Assembly (in February).
Organization of an annual Ada Exhibition (in the Spring). The 1995 Ada-Belgium Ada Exhibition was held on May 17th, 1995, in Leuven.
(Contact Ada-Belgium if you'd like to have a booth at the 1996 exhibition.)
Organization of workshops and tutorials on Ada related topics, such as the full-day AdaSAGE Tutorial on June 2nd, 1995, in Leuven (Heverlee).
Publication of the Ada-Belgium Newsletter (3 issues per year).
Representation of Belgium in Ada-Europe and the international Ada community. Dissemination of information, such as the current status of the Ada9X project.
Managing an Ada archive for Belgium with free Ada 83 & Ada 95 compilers, hypertext reference manuals and a tutorial, part of the Public Ada Library, etc.
(We are still looking for sponsors of a large disk, so we can mirror several Ada archives directly.)
Running two e-mail lists: a discussion list for members only and an announcements list for anyone interested. Feel free to join.

Interested to register as an Ada-Belgium member? Just fill out the Membership Application Form and mail or fax it to the secretariat.

Call for Ada-Belgium sponsors

Companies willing to express their interest in Ada or their support for Ada-Belgium, may become a sponsor of the organization. Sponsors will be mentioned in all publications of Ada-Belgium, and in a special page on this WWW-server.

Contact me if you are interested.

Pointers to Ada related information and events

An enormous amount of Ada related information was already available on the Internet. More and more of this is now also becoming available via WWW.

The Home of the Brave Ada Programmers (HBAP)
The most interesting starting point for Web browsing on Ada is undoubtedly the Ada WWW Server at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.
Public Ada Library
Probably the largest collection of Ada-related software and documents is available in the Public Ada Library at the Washington University Archive in the U.S.A. (WUarchive), or one of its mirrors at Walnut Creek CDROM (U.S.A.) and at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers (CNAM, in Paris, France).
Lots of Pointers
I'm building pages with pointers to useful Ada information, such as Ada Success Stories with information about how Ada has been used in a variety of (mostly) non-military applications. But also less serious material, such as an Ada Picture Gallery is available.
Ada Software provided by Belgian Ada users
(Pointers to) Ada software made available by Belgian Ada users.
Conferences
Several announcements of conferences and events that may be of interest for the Ada community, are being posted to Usenet and are available here.
Reference Manuals and Tutorial (latest versions)
The hypertext Ada83 LRM, the hypertext Ada 95 RM (ISO/IEC 8652:1995), the hypertext Ada 95 Rationale, and the free self-directed Ada tutorial Lovelace can be consulted. You can also down-load all of this for local browsing, either from the mirror on the Ada-Belgium ftp-server, or from the original distribution directory.
Reference Manuals (old versions, local on this server)
The hypertext Ada83 LRM (2.3) and the draft hypertext Ada 9X RM (5.0) can be consulted. You can also down-load the 83 (tar-gzip-ed) or 9X (zip) versions for local browsing.

Other Ada organizations

An announcement of the formation of Team Ada, an informal organization dedicated to telling the world about the advantages of the Ada programming language.

Information on Special Interest Groups in Ada, and more specificaly National Ada Associations.

A sample of other Ada organizations on the Web (incomplete):

ACM/SIGAda (ACM Special Interest Group on the Ada programming language)
AdaIC (Ada Information Clearinghouse)
Ada in Sweden
Ada UK
ASSET (Asset Source for Software Engineering Technology)
STARS (Software Technology for Adaptable, Reliable Systems Program)

Main ideas that can help "sell" Ada 95

(This list was started by Jean-Pierre Rosen, rosen@enst.fr.)

Ada is the first internationally standardized OO language.
Ada brings concurrency to objects (not exactly a first, but certainly the first wide-spread language to do so).
Ada: OOP with security (and readability and maintainability).
GNAT: try Ada 95 at no cost!
And for old Ada-ers: Ada is still Ada, just brought up-to-date.

Ada 95 is a concurrent object oriented standardized language with support for distribution as well as numerics, information systems, real-time systems, and many other types of applications. The concurrency is well-defined and thoroughly integrated with all of the other features of the language offering a multitude of opportunities which are difficult to realize in other languages.
(From tokar@tartan.com)

Does Ada have multiple inheritance?
(From rosen@enst.fr)

YES, with a mechanism that is slightly different from what is found in other languages. It's normal: since Ada is the most recent object oriented language, it has learned from previous experience. More specifically, the chosen mechanism is safer, especially in presence of repeated inheritance.
You may find that this mechanism requires a bit more typing, but this is consistent with Ada's philosophy that ease of reading and safety should prevail over ease of writing.

Other "ammunition" is available here, and of course also on the Ada WWW Server.

Acknowledgements:
the Department of Computer Science of the K.U.Leuven in Belgium kindly provides some of the computer resources to run the Ada-Belgium WWW-, ftp- and e-mail servers and associated mailing lists; and our sponsors provide the means to make Ada-Belgium possible.

While browsing the Ada-Belgium WWW Server, clicking on this icon will always bring you back to the Ada-Belgium home page, i.e. here.

Last update: 95/05/18.

Usage of the Ada-Belgium pages is kept track of through usage statistics. See also Dirk's usage statistics.

Feedback is appreciated.
For comments, additions, corrections, etc. e-mail to:

Dirk Craeynest (dirk@cs.kuleuven.ac.be)