Scientific Ada

This book deals with those aspects of the use of the Ada programming language which are relevant to the scientific (i.e. numeric) community at large. Starting with some of the historical aspects of Ada, the book develops the rationale for the adoption of Ada as a general-purpose language, and examines the position of Ada relative to other scientific languages such as Fortran, Pascal and Algol. A deeper technical section concentrates on the numeric models of Ada, and a number of Ada-specific features (e.g. generics) are examined. Major work on guidelines for the design of large scientific libraries in Ada is then reviewed. An appendix contains a substantial amount of compiled and tested code to illustrate the text.