What future for the distributed systems annex?

In this paper, we report our experience as implementors and users of the Ada 95 Distributed Systems Annex (annex E of the Ada reference manual). We identify the principal strengths and weaknesses of the annex, and make some proposals to improve it either immediately or for the next revision of the language (Ada0X). Our goal is to get an annex that is more open and compatible with other distributed systems such as CORBA, without loosing the capability of developing pure Ada rock solid distributed systems.We assume that the reader is familiar with Ada. Knowledge of the Distributed Systems Annex is useful but not required to understand the main ideas exposed in this article.

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