"Ada, language for a complex world" is the title of a (german) tutorial. One could also say "a complex language for a complex world", since Ada is a big, complex language containing a wealth of features.
Ada is the only language in this book that is the result of a contest. This contest was initiated by the DoD in 1975 to find the new programming language for mission critical systems (in particular real-time and embedded systems). The winner, designed by Honeywell-Bull, was named Ada after the world's first programmer, Lady Ada Lovelace, the assistant of Charles Baggabe. The first standard came out in 1983 (Ada83), and a significant extension including object-oriented features in 1995 (Ada95).
We will use the GNU Ada95 compiler Gnat, version 3.14p, to run the examples in this chapter. It is part of most Linux distributions. The compiler consists of a whole set of tools to compile, link, and organize Ada programs. For most of our sample programs it is sufficient to call the utility gnatmake on the source file. It will perform the required compile and link steps automatically.