Experimenting dynamic linking in Ada

A proposal to achieve dynamic reconfiguration within the framework of the Ada programming language is presented. A dynamic linking kernel facility is illustrated and its implementation using the Verdix VADS 5.5 Ada compiling system on a SUN3-120 running the BSD Unix version 4.3 operating system is discussed. This kernel allows an Ada program to dynamically change its own configuration, linking at run-time new pieces of code. It is shown how this dynamic facility can be consistently integrated at the Ada language level, without introducing severe inconsistencies with respect to the standard semantics.