This short paper presents a language and an interactive editor for describing Ada software components. The main objective is to facilitate reusability of software components by adding a framework for standardized interfaces to abstract data types and providing automatic tools that translate the framework into Ada package specifications. Viewed in another way, they provide a way to simulate object-oriented programming in Ada.

After a brief general introduction, the paper covers successively the following points: object-oriented components; interfaces as components; an introduction to CDL, the Component Description Language (several very illuminating examples in this section make it the longest one by far); the component library; joining components together; editor operation; automatic interface transformation and inference; and current aims.

The paper is interesting to read but not sufficiently self-contained, as it necessitates some knowledge of OBJ and Mascot 3. There are several misprints, the most offensive being that pages 82 and 83 are interchanged. The language and tool described are highly experimental at the moment, and have some very unpleasant characteristics that should be corrected. Further developments of these ideas should be described in subsequent papers.