From the Editor’s Desk

Welcome to this issue of Ada Letters. In this issue you will find details on the very successful SIGAda 2007 annual conference. One of the highlights of the conference was Static Analysis Summit II (SAMATE) organized by Paul Black of the US National Institute of Standards and Technology. Some of the presentations made during the workshop are listed in this issue. This release also includes the paper “Assessment of String Tests Strategy for an En Route Air Traffic Control System” by Jeff O’Leary et al. This latest multi billion dollar Ada based systems has been developed ahead of schedule and under the budget http://www.faa.gov/news/fact_sheets/news_story.cfm?newsId=7714 The FAA Administrator has said “This software is a huge step toward the next generation of air traffic control”.

Inside you'll find information on SIGAda 2008 Conference (October 26-30 at Portland, OR) and 13th International Conference on Reliable Software Technologies -Ada-Europe 2008 (16-20 June 2008) Venice, Italy. These conferences will be great opportunities to learn more about what is in the new revision of the Ada language, and how implementations of Ada 2005 are accomplished, as well as other research and industry uses of Ada. September 2007 brought another successful Ada Conference "The Ada Conference UK 2007", being organized to promote awareness of the Ada programming language and to highlight the increased relevance of Ada in safety-and security-critical programming by the Centre for Software Reliability (CSR) in collaboration with the Safety-Critical Systems Club.
To promote Ada, in February this year I participated in the ACM sponsored 1st India Software Engineering Conference held at prestigious International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) at Hyderabad, India. I met various top managers of large India based IT companies such as Tata Consulting Services (TCS), InfoSys, Satyam, Wipro in addition to Microsoft, Accenture, Philips, Siemens etc and computer science faculties of IITs mostly from IIT Kanpur. I also had a good discussion with Lalit Sawhney, the most prominent Indian IT Industry Federation leader who invited me to join and promote Ada through the alliance. Of interest to you all, SIGAda Chair Prof. John McCormick has reported a surge in sale of his Ada 2005 Data Structures book, mostly in India.
Ada Letters would be a great place to submit articles on your experiences with the language revision, tips on how to do things with the new language features, as well as to describe success stories using Ada. We'll look forward to your submission. You can submit either a MS Word or Adobe PDF file (with 1" margins and no page numbers) to our technical editor:

Editorial Policy (from Alok Srivastava, Managing Editor)
As the editor of Ada Letters, I'd like to thank you for your continued support of ACM SIGAda, and encourage you to submit articles for publication. In addition, if there is some way we can make Ada Letters more useful to you, please let me know. Note that Ada Letters is now on the web! See http://www.acm.org/sigada/ada_letters/index.html. The two newest issues are available only to SIGAda members. Older issues beginning March 2000 are available to all. Now that Ada is standing on its own merits without the support of the DoD, lots of people and organizations have stepped up to provide new tools, mechanisms for compiler validation/assessment, and standards (especially ASIS). The Ada 2005 language version is fulfilling the market demand of robust safety and security elements and thereby generating a new enthusiasm into the software development. Ada Letters is a venue for you to share your successes and ideas with others in the Ada community. Be sure to take advantage of it so that we can all benefit from each other's learning and experience.
As some of the other ACM Special Interest Group periodicals have moved, Ada Letters also transitioned from quarterly to a tri-annual publication. With exception of special issues, Ada Letters now is going to be published three times a year, with the exception of special issues. The revised schedules and submission deadlines are as follows:

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