7. Parallelism

Ada was one of the first languages to integrate parallelism natively, based on the notion of task. A task is an entity that runs on a dedicated execution thread, while the "main program" also has its own execution thread.

It should be noted that a program with tasks only terminates when all its component tasks have themselves terminated. A parallel program written in Ada can be considered to run as a process in the sense of an operating system, and its component tasks as threads, again in the sense of an operating system. All tasks have access to the program's global variables.

The 1995 revision introduced the notion of "protection", which applies to a type or variable. An entity of this type has no ordinal counter of its own, but is equipped with synchronization means inspired by Hoare's notion of a monitor.