Ada

A Pascal descended computer language, designed by Jean Ichbiah's team at CII Honeywell in 1979, made mandatory for Department of Defense software projects by the Pentagon. Ada is a large, complex, block-structured language aimed primarily at embedded applications. It has facilities for real-time response, concurrency, hardware access and reliable run-time error handling. In support of large-scale software engineering, it emphasises strong typing, data abstraction and encapsulation. The type system uses name equivalence and includes both subtypes and derived types. Both fixed and floating-point numerical types are supported.

It was named after Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, who worked with Charles Babbage.

See also: Computer, Programming Languages.