Ada is a structured

Structured programming

Structured programming is a programming paradigm aimed on improving the clarity, quality, and development time of a computer program by making extensive use of subroutines, block structures and for and while loops - in contrast to using simple tests and jumps such as the goto statement which could...

, statically typed, imperative

Imperative programming

In computer science, imperative programming is a programming paradigm that describes computation in terms of statements that change a program state...

, wide-spectrum

Wide-spectrum language

A wide-spectrum language is a programming language designed to be simultaneously a low-level and a high-level language—possibly a non-executable specification language. Wide-spectrum languages are designed to support a programming methodology based on program refinement.The concept was...

, and object-oriented

Object-oriented programming

Object-oriented programming is a programming paradigm using "objects" – data structures consisting of data fields and methods together with their interactions – to design applications and computer programs. Programming techniques may include features such as data abstraction,...

 high-level computer

Computer programming

Computer programming is the process of designing, writing, testing, debugging, and maintaining the source code of computer programs. This source code is written in one or more programming languages. The purpose of programming is to create a program that performs specific operations or exhibits a...

 programming language

Programming language

A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....

, extended from Pascal

Pascal (programming language)

Pascal is an influential imperative and procedural programming language, designed in 1968/9 and published in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth as a small and efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring.A derivative known as Object Pascal...

 and other languages. It has strong built-in language support for explicit concurrency, offering tasks, synchronous message passing (via guarded task entries), protected objects (a monitor-like construct with additional guards as in conditional critical regions) and nondeterminism (via select statements).

Ada was originally designed by a team led by Jean Ichbiah

Jean Ichbiah

Jean David Ichbiah was a French-born computer scientist and the chief designer of Ada, a general-purpose, strongly typed programming language with certified validated compilers....

 of CII Honeywell Bull

Groupe Bull

-External links:* * — Friends, co-workers and former employees of Bull and Honeywell* *...

 under contract to the United States Department of Defense

United States Department of Defense

The United States Department of Defense is the U.S...

 (DoD) from 1977 to 1983 to supersede the hundreds of programming languages then used by the DoD.