ISO approves Ada 2012 language standard

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has approved Ada 2012 language standard, according to a press release from Ada-Europe and the Ada Resource Association (ARA). ISO/IEC JTC 1 issued the formal approval on November 20th. Standards were published on December 15th.

A summary of the changes to ADA can be found at ARA's web site (www.ada2012.org/). Ada 2012's improvements include (according to this excerpt from ARA):

Contract-based programming

• Preconditions and postconditions define the expectations and obligations of a subprogram.
• Type invariants specify boundary constraints for objects of an encapsulated (private) type.
• Subtype predicates capture general constraints on data objects.

Increased expressiveness

• Expression functions offer a convenient way to express simple functions.
• Conditional expressions provide a compact notation for a common idiom.
• Quantified expressions for universal and existential forms specify predicates over arrays and containers.

Concurrency and multicore support

• Task affinities and dispatching domains allow tasks to be mapped to specific CPUs or cores.
• Ravenscar for multiprocessor systems adapts a safe and widely used tasking profile to modern architectures.

Container enhancements

• Bounded containers use stack allocation and do not incur the overhead of dynamic memory management.
• Task-safe queues and priority queues provide efficient implementations of synchronized structures.
• Holder containers create singleton structures for objects of an unconstrained type.
• Iterators provide familiar idioms with uniform syntax to search and manipulate arrays and containers.

Note: the above bullet points are verbatim from www.ada2012.org/.

Ada 2012 is under the jurisdiction of ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG9. The ARA and Ada-Europe were sponsors of the standards review, which was conducted by Ada Rapporteur Group (ARG) subunit of WG9.
 
Press release is available here from Ada-Europe.

Related content:
Jack Ganssle's “Ada gets a makeover”