Getting Started with Ada: Setting Up Your Development Environment

June 30, 2024

Welcome to the second installment of our Ada programming language series! In this post, we will guide you through setting up your development environment for Ada programming. By the end of this guide, you will have all the necessary tools installed, your IDE configured, and you will have created your first Ada program.

Installing Necessary Tools

The first step in getting started with Ada is to ensure that you have all the necessary tools installed on your system. The main tools you will need are:

  • GNAT Compiler: The GNAT compiler is the official compiler for the Ada programming language. You can download it from the AdaCore website.
  • IDE: While you can write Ada code in a simple text editor, using an IDE can greatly improve your development experience. One popular IDE for Ada is GNAT Programming Studio (GPS).

Configuring the IDE

Once you have installed the necessary tools, it’s time to configure your IDE. If you have chosen to use GPS, you can follow these steps:

  1. Open GPS and create a new project.
  2. Set the project type to Ada.
  3. Add your Ada source files to the project.
  4. Build the project to ensure everything is set up correctly.

Creating Your First Ada Program

Now that your development environment is set up, it’s time to create your first Ada program. Here is a simple ‘Hello, World!’ program in Ada:

with Ada.Text_IO; use Ada.Text_IO;procedure Hello isbegin  Put_Line('Hello, World!');end Hello;

Save this code in a file with a .adb extension, such as hello.adb. Add this file to your GPS project, build the project, and then run the program. You should see ‘Hello, World!’ printed to the console.

Congratulations! You have successfully set up your development environment for Ada programming and created your first Ada program. Stay tuned for more tutorials on Ada programming!