On The Suitability Of Ada For Artificial Intelligence Applications

This report summarizes the results of our analysis of the suitability of the Department of Defense (DOD) programming language Ada for Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications. As ada is expected to become a major programming language in the 1980's with widespread usage in both the military and commercial sectors, a reasonable question to be asked is whether Ada could benefit the efforts of AI system development or transfer. A large store of language and environment support tools are expected to appear within the next several years. The ability for the AI community to avail themselves of such technology would serve the needs of both AI systems developers and the ultimate recipients of the developed technology. In this report, we consider the suitability of the Preliminary Ada Language Specification either as a language for the development of AI systems or as a language for the transfer of already-developed AI technology. We focus our attention on the language capabilities required to support AI paradigms and their realization in Ada. (Author).