Ada and GNAT Pro Training

Course 6 - Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) with Ada 2005

Target Audience

Developers interested in learning or perfecting their OOP skills.
Programming experience in a high-level language is required. Knowledge of Ada fundamentals is desirable but not strictly necessary.

Course Duration

5 Days

Workshop

Hands-on exercises using the GNAT Pro Ada 2005 toolset.

Course Description

This specialized course examines the concepts of object-oriented programming and software engineering and, within that context, fully explores the Ada support for OOP. Ada 2005 extends the Ada 95 support for traditional OOP and offers innovative new capabilities that go beyond those of other mainstream languages. For example, Ada defines “thread-safe interfaces” that extend the Java notion of interfaces.

Following a brief introduction to the pertinent fundamentals of Ada, the course examines in detail these language facilities and the idioms emerging from their use. Coverage of the approaches to expressing selected design patterns is also provided, as well as an overview of the new standard Containers data structures.

Summary of Topics Covered

- Fundamental concepts: encapsulation, abstract data types, polymorphism, dynamic dispatching, inheritance, single and multiple inheritance, interface and implementation inheritance

- Abstract types and subprograms and their use to define frameworks

- Interfaces: expressing multiple inheritance, comparison to abstract types

- Class-wide programming

- Expressing inheritance idioms while controlling implementation visibility

- Generic unit support for OOP and when to use generic units in OOP

- Expressing automatic initialization and finalization

- Concurrency: thread-safe interfaces, integrating objects and threads, the Inheritance Anomaly

- Implementation of selected design patterns

- OOP by value versus OOP by reference, advantages of each

- Overview of the Ada 2005 standard Containers library