Ada, an analyst and a metaphysician
Betty Alexandra Toole · ACM SIGAda Ada Letters · 1991
Is Ada a fitting name for the software language named after her?Today, words, symbols and language are so manipulated that what Darell Huff proclaimed for numbers, "Statistics Don't Lie, But Liars use Statistics", certainly applies to words. Mario Pei, in Words in Sheep's Clothing , states that words have come to mean either the opposite of what they originally meant, or something so remote and confusing that one hesitates to use them.This article will give you a glimmer of the fascinating human story of Ada. Hopefully that glimmer, or biopsy, will not distort but enrich the information available about her life. Human beings are inconsistent, that is both their weakness and their strength. To fashion data about a human being into a consistency, in order to prove a point often makes me suspicious. However, the more I know about Ada, the software language, the more appropriate. I believe the name Ada is for the software language. You, as users of Ada, are a better judge of that and I would certainly appreciate your reaction and observations.The information that I have selected for this article are from the thousands of letters in the Lovelace-Byron Collection at Oxford University, the British Library, and Ada's Notes. The emphasis is on how Ada approached information, mathematics, science and technology. Perhaps, this glimpse of Ada's life and the way she thought, might prompt you to see a connection between Ada's story and the history, structure and implementation of Ada, the software language.