The Steelman language requirements were a set of requirements which a high-level general-purpose

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming ...

should meet, created by the

United States Department of Defense The United States Department of Defense (DoD, USDOD or DOD) is an executive branch department of the federal government charged with coordinating and supervising all agencies and functions of the government directly related to national secu ...

in ''The Department of Defense Common High Order Language program'' in 1978. The predecessors of this document were called, in order, "Strawman", "Woodenman", "Tinman" and "Ironman". The requirements focused on the needs of embedded computer applications, and emphasised reliability, maintainability, and efficiency. Notably, they included

exception handling In computing and computer programming, exception handling is the process of responding to the occurrence of ''exceptions'' – anomalous or exceptional conditions requiring special processing – during the execution of a program. In general, an ...

facilities,

run-time checking Runtime error detection is a software verification method that analyzes a software application as it executes and reports defects that are detected during that execution. It can be applied during unit testing, component testing, integration test ...

, and

parallel computing Parallel computing is a type of computation in which many calculations or processes are carried out simultaneously. Large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which can then be solved at the same time. There are several different fo ...

. It was concluded that no existing language met these criteria to a sufficient extent, so a contest was called to create a language that would be closer to fulfilling them. The design that won this contest became the

Ada programming language Ada is a structured, statically typed, imperative, and object-oriented high-level programming language, extended from Pascal and other languages. It has built-in language support for '' design by contract'' (DbC), extremely strong typing, expl ...

. The resulting language followed the Steelman requirements closely, though not exactly. The Ada 95 revision of the language went beyond the Steelman requirements, targeting general-purpose systems in addition to embedded ones, and adding features supporting

object-oriented programming Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of "objects", which can contain data and code. The data is in the form of fields (often known as attributes or ''properties''), and the code is in the form of pr ...

References

External links

* Department of Defense (June 1978)
Requirements for High Order Computer Programming Languages: "Steelman"
* David A. Wheeler (1996)
Introduction to Steelman On-Line
(Version 1.2). * SoftTech Inc. (1976)
"Evaluation of ALGOL 68, Jovial J3B, Pascal, SIMULA 67, and TACPOL Versus TINMAN - Requirements for a Common High Order Programming Language."
- See also:

Jovial JOVIAL is a high-level programming language based on ALGOL 58, specialized for developing embedded systems (specialized computer systems designed to perform one or a few dedicated functions, usually embedded as part of a larger, more complete dev ...

J3B, Pascal,

SIMULA Simula is the name of two simulation programming languages, Simula I and Simula 67, developed in the 1960s at the Norwegian Computing Center in Oslo, by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard. Syntactically, it is an approximate superset of ALGOL 6 ...

67, and

TACPOL TACPOL (Tactical Procedure Oriented Language) is a block structured programming language developed by the United States Army for the TACFIRE Tactical Fire Direction command and control application. TACPOL is similar to PL/I. Language constructs ...

(Defense Technical Information Center - DTIC ADA037637, Report Number 1021-14). * David A. Wheeler (1997)
"Ada, C, C++, and Java vs. The Steelman"
Originally published in ''Ada Letters'' July/August 1997. Ada (programming language) Programming language design {{prog-lang-stub