The following chapters cover the language itself; the syntax and semantics. The core language as covered by the ISO standard should be implemented by all compilers, although some embedded systems may, for instance, not have tasking support.
Wherever possible the text will build upon only features introduced before, however the Ada language is intricate and many features are supportive, for example packages and tagged types are bound up very closely and so if I do have to refer forward please bear with me.
These chapters acts as the foundation for the rest of the book; it will give you a brief introduction to Ada basics, such as types and statements. Once you have an understanding of these you will be able to read quite a lot of Ada source without difficulty. We start with the Ada operators, arithmetic, relational logical and bitwise (C++ classification). Section 2.3 covers the statements available in Ada, it will compare them directly with their C++ counterparts. The following section on types is possibly the most challenging and may require some attention, Ada is very strongly typed but provides a very wide set of predefined or library types and allows you an unprecedented level of control over defining your own types. I will round up the chapter with a view of the safety features of Ada and some of the unsafe features.
Copyright ©
1996 Simon Johnston &
Addison Wesley Longman