An Educational System for the Study of Tasking in Ada

This paper describes an ``educational Ada¹ tasking subsystem.´´ It features an interpreter running Ada tasking programs and automatically giving information about each significant event occurring within tasks. These traces can also be given to a postprocessor which prints a schematic overview of the overall activity of the tasks and gives a separate listing of the activity of each task. In this way, students can see all the activity going on within and between the tasks. It is thus very useful for teaching concurrent programming which is usually quite hard to grasp because of the lack of adequate tracing tools.