Ada 9X for distributed systems

Developing software to control safety-critical applications requires programming abstractions that are unavailable in many of today's programming languages. The Ada programming language was designed to provide support for such applications within a unified language framework, but it is now commonly accepted that the language has not totally succeeded in achieving all its stated design goals. Ada has successfully addressed many of the software engineering issues associated with the production of large real-time software. It has failed, however, to satisfy applications requiring the use of multiple computers or parallel-intensive computation. Ada is under review. The goal of the revision activity, designated the Ada 9X project, is to provide essential language requirements with minimum negative impact and maximum positive impact on the Ada community. The paper reviews the emerging distribution requirements for Ada 9X.<
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