Ada is a general purpose programming language designed on demand of the US Department of Defense. Programs written in this language are known to be very stable, because the language itself allows a verification of the code during the compile time and helps eliminating run-time errors. With the Ada95-Standard released in 1995, Ada became the world's first internationally standardized (by both, ANSI and ISO) object-oriented programming language (about 2 years before C++).

The American National Standards Institute is the national US institute for standardization. Many of the standard documents released by this organization are also released by ISO, making them internationally valid.

An Application Programming Interface is an interface between an application level program and a controlling program (e.g. a graphical environment, a database driver or an operating system).