Experimenting with dynamic linking with ADA

An approach to achieving dynamic reconfiguration within the framework of Ada1 is described. A technique for introducing a kernel facility for dynamic reconfiguration in Ada is illustrated, and its implementation using the Verdix VADS 5.5 Ada compiling system on a Sun3–120 running the 4.3 BSD Unix operating system is discussed. This experimental kernel allows an Ada program to change its own configuration dynamically, linking new pieces of code at run‐time. It is shown how this dynamic facility can be integrated consistently at the Ada language level, without introducing severe inconsistencies with respect to the Standard semantics.