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In a project, can you develop one module in Ada and another in SPARK and compile them together ? So, you can use safety-critical code in one module and regular Ada code in other modules ?

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Yes, you can mix and match the two. This lets you do things like build a library with SPARK for some critical portion where you want SPARK's guarantees and can accept its limitations, and incorporate it into an application built with the rest of Ada.

Oh lovely - need to put Ada on the learning plan. Formal languages were a bit of a drag because you needed to maintain a separate "specification" copy of your critical code.

Going through Ada sample programs and surprised I can grok stuff without knowing anything about the language. Wondering why it never took off in the standard software world. Sure its a bit verbose, but so are Java and MacOS API's

https://learn.adacore.com/ - I'd start here, good set of tutorials on the language including some comparative ones. It won't teach you everything you might need to know, but it's a free and good starting point.

I think at least slow and expensive compilers back in the days, the defense and aerospace stigma, and in more recent times a common misperception that it’s closed source. And it’s never been cool stuff.

And yes you’re right, it’s a very good language.

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