How Ada object orientation works

Recommended Prerequisites: Familiarity with Object Oriented Programming principles in a language such as Ada, Java, or C++ is recommended. Previous experience with C or Ada 83 is strongly recommended. This tutorial will briefly describe the Object-Oriented (OO) features provided by Ada 95, and then discuss in detail how some of these features are implemented "under the hood." The bulk of the tutorial will show, via code examples and discussion, how dynamic dispatching is implemented in Ada 95, issues associated with the class tag, and the effort required to add a sibling class and a child class to an existing class hierarchy. We will briefly discuss several Ada 2005 features, and the value these features add over an Ada 95 implementation of a program. We will conclude with a brief discussion of the "overloaded vocabulary" issues encountered by Java and C++ programmers as they transition to an Ada 95 or Ada 2005 project "on the fly."