Ada program partitioning language: a notion for distributing Ada programs

Ada Program Partitioning Language (APPL) has been designed as part of Honeywell´s Distributed Ada project. The goal of the project is to develop an approach for reducing the complexity of building distributed applications in Ada. In the proposed approach, an application is written as a single Ada program using the full capabilities of the Ada language. It is not necessary to factor the underlying hardware configuration into the program design. Once the program has been completed and tested in the host development environment, it is partitioned into fragments and mapped onto the distributed hardware. The partitioning and mapping are expressed in APPL and do not require changes to the Ada source. The main thrusts of the project include the design of APPL and the development of language translation tools and the run-time system to support Ada and APPL for a distributed target. The authors present an overview of APPL, the goals considered in the design, and issues that impact its implementation