1. Ada program components

In 1975, the U.S. Department of Defense, realizing that hundreds of different programming languages were in use in its various agencies, and considering the maintenance costs involved, launched a study to alleviate the problem of the "software crisis" (a term coined at the first NATO Software Engineering Conference in 1972).

At the time, the origin of this crisis appeared to lie in the multitude and inadequacy of programming languages. A series of studies (with deadlines every six months), carried out under the aegis of the High Order Language Working Group (HOLWG), aimed to determine, in ever finer detail, the specifications of an ideal language. Subsequently, other studies attempted to identify which of the languages existing at the time would correspond to such characteristics. When it became clear that no such...