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About Ada - The Programming Language

By David Bolton, About.com

Definition: Ada is a programming language invented in the early 1980s as part of a US Government sponsored competition for a new standard language. It was named after Countess Ada Lovelace, the daughter of the poet Lord Byron. She was a friend of the inventor Charles Babbage famous for his "Difference Engine", a mechanical computer.

Ada is similar to Pascal, for instance employing begin.. end to mark blocks of code rather than the curly braces { } used in C, C++ and C#. It is now used mostly in the military and safety-critical areas such as aviation flight control systems, nuclear poower stations and some medical equipment but has not been a success in other commercial software sectors.

Glossary:

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