Welcome to ACM SIGAda's 2001 Annual International Conference -the yearly "meeting place" of the Ada community! We welcome youback to Minnesota, where much of the original Ada work took place.The GREEN language which became Ada was a product of Honeywell. Oneof the first Ada compilers was built by an group in Control Data(now part of General Dynamics) and important language design workwas done by Sperry-Univac (now part of Lockheed-Martin). Thecurrent Crusadar (UDLP) and RAAF (Lockheed-Martin) projectscontinue to show how Ada can be used effectively and efficiently tobuild high-quality systems.>As we move into the 21st century, Ada continues unparalleled inthe areas of distributed, real-time, and embedded systems. Wherecorrectness, reliability, and robustness are a concern, Ada's trackrecord of an all-around success is unparalleled. At a time whenauthorities such as Capers Jones indicate that the biggest gain ineffectiveness and efficiency comes from the reuse of high-qualitydeliverables (and biggest loss from the reuse of low-qualitydeliverables), Ada's concepts of interface and implementationseparation, generics, and packaging take increased interest fromthe software development community. For example, the Java genericsproposal echos that of Ada83; we know that Ada has almost a 20-yearlead in these areas only now being recognized as issues by otherlanguages. And the Ada95 fully implemented distributed-concurrencyon top of concurrent objects clearly tops other solutions, as shownby Per Brinch Hansen's 1999 SIGPlan arcticle on Java's insecureparallelism.>We offer you a conference featuring a top-quality technicalprogram focused on important strengths of Ada: distributed,real-time, and embedded systems. The visions of these systemsreflected in Ada's original requirements in the 1970s have expandedin almost unimagineable ways with Ada95 implementations, andcontinue to be objects of envy by those in the programming languagecommunity who understand what the strengths of a language brings toimplementors in terms of efficiency, reliability, andeffectiveness. Software challenges remain dominant in these domainswith rapid hardware advances. Most other languages fail to meet theneeds identified as far back as the 1976 Steelman, being able atbest to do only 3A of the needed function while Ada performs over95%. Ada's track record of reliability, efficiency, robustness andall-around success is unparalleled at solving real-time and/ordistributed system challenges. High-speed ground transportationsystems all over the world, most modem jetliner avionics, satellitesystems, and battle automation use Ada and power important parts ofthe world's economies and defenses. Two days of technical papers,keynotes, and invited presentations will report how these successesare achieved and where remaining issues are leading.>To complement technical papers and keynote talks focused onthese themes, parallel=track sessions on other important Adasoftware engineering and education topics are also offered atSIGAda2001. Yet, with few exceptions, these topics directly orindirectly interact with theme topics. Thus, we hope you will findthe entire technical program enticing whether or not you axecurrently working in distributed and/or real-time embeddeddomains.>Beyond the formal conference of selected papers andpresentations, SIGAda 2001 offers workshops and tutorials with thesame duality of on-theme and complementary topics. SIGAda'stutorials and workshops provide full- or half-days for thoseworking the same issues to share with each other and leverageeveryone's accomplishments; workshop products are "delivered" tothe community. The broad offerings of career-enhancing tutorialsinclude basic Ada 95 introductions for software engineers new toAria, intermediate and advanced Ada topics for practitionersstriving to expand their Ada expertise, and severallanguage-independent technology topics such as proving programscorrect. These topies arc often
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