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LADY-LOV.HLP

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                             THE NAMING OF Ada

The Ada programming language was originally christened "DoD-1" by the general 
press.  DoD's High Order Language Working Group (HOLWG), however, never 
accepted that name, fearing its military overtones might prejudice nonmilitary 
users against it.

In 1979, Jack Cooper of the Navy Materiel Command thought of naming the 
language "Ada", which was widely accepted by the HOLWG.  The name honors 
Countess Augusta Ada Lovelace, a mathematician and the only legitimate 
daughter of poet Lord Byron.  While in her twenties, she worked with Charles 
Babbage on his Difference Engine and thus is considered the world's first 
computer programmer.

Lady Lovelace died in 1852 at the age of 36.

                   THE REAL Ada COUNTESS OF LOVELACE
                by Carol L. James and Duncan E. Morrill

The following is reprinted with permission from ACM SIGSoft Software 
Engineering Notes, Vol. 8 No. 1, Jan. 1983.

It was becoming embarrassing.  The Department of Defense had been working for 
some years on the development of the high-order language to program its 
embedded computers, but the language still had no official name -- only 
informal designations like DoD-1, which no one in the DoD High Order Language 
Working Group favored because that implied a language specifically for 
military purposes and might inhibit its use in universities and other 
non-military spheres.

According to Air Force Colonel William A. Whitaker, the first HOLWG chairman, 
many names were proposed, but it was Commander John D. Cooper, the Navy's 
HOLWG member, who in May 1979 came up with a name that HOLWG (representing 
various government branches) could approve unanimously: Ada, in honor of an 
obscure but talented mathematician, Ada, Countess of Lovelace.

Back in the 1840's, Ada Lovelace had worked with Charles Babbage on his 
mechanical computer invention, the analytical engine.  Babbage's hopes for 
continued funding from the British government for building his machine were 
frustrated after a few years, compounding his technical difficulties -- the 
greatest one being that the engine required parts whose fabrication was beyond 
the state of the art then and for many decades thereafter -- so that the 
computer never became fully operational.  Nonetheless, the Countess of 
Lovelace worked out most of its theoretical principles, as well as its 
programming, and has thus been called -- with much justification -- the first 
computer programmer.

Evidently inspired by Bertram V. Bowden's 1950s computer book, "Faster Than 
Thought", which dealt with the work of Babbage and the countess, HOLWG 
approved the name "Ada" and received permission from Ada's descendant, the 
Earl of Lytton, to use it.  Colonel Whitaker says the earl, himself a retired 
lieutenant colonel of the British army, was immediately enthusiastic about the 
idea and pointed out that the letters "Ada" stood "right in the middle of 
`radar'."

The Ada project is still almost as unfamiliar to most people as the name Ada 
Lovelace, but its activities and accomplishments are considerable and include 
the Ada language MIL-STD-1815 (10 Dec 1980), Ada for MIL-STD-1750A 
instruction-set architecture, Ada-Europe, and AdaTEC of the ACM.

Use of the countess's name seems especially fitting for such ambitious 
endeavors since any serious study of the historical record shows that hers was 
not some idiosyncratic affliction but a comprehensive and integrated faculty 
encompassing the philosophical and the practical.  Her major extant scientific 
work -- notes she appended to her translation into English of the L. F. 
Menabrea paper on Babbage's analytical engine attest to her mathematical 
knowledge and scientific intellect.  About three times longer than the 
Menabrea work itself, the notes display mastery of both the mathematical 
theory and numerical techniques of Babbage's computing engines.  England's 
Scientific leaders of the day -- Michael Faraday, Sir John Herschel, Charles 
Wheatstone, Mary Somerville, and Augustus De Morgan -- knew and appreciated 
her abilities.

Her father was the poet Lord Byron who, while still a bachelor, underwent an 
experience that was to have profound effects upon his only legitimate child, 
born Augusta Ada Byron.  At 25, he fell in love with his married half sister, 
Augusta Leigh; and to deny that an incestuous relationship existed between 
them is to ignore an overwhelming body of evidence, although his paternity of 
her daughter Elizabeth Medora Leigh, born in 1814, is less certain.  In 
January 1815, Byron married Annabella Milbanke, a puritanical young woman of 
good family and an amateur mathematician.  Unfortunately, their personalities 
were incompatible, and a few weeks after Augusta Ada was born (December 10, 
1815), the couple separated.  Shortly afterward, rumors concerning Byron's 
previous affair with Augusta destroyed his reputation and social 
acceptability, forcing him to take up permanent residence on the Continent.  
However, subsequent letters and much of his poetry show tender concern for the 
child he never saw again.  He died at 36, eight years after her birth.

Lady Byron resolved to bring up her daughter (now called Ada, for obvious 
reasons) to be as unlike Byron as possibly.  Setting herself up as a paragon 
while hinting of unspeakable evil in her husband's character, she encouraged 
Ada's mathematical talent but discouraged any traits that reminded her of 
Byron.

When Ada was about 14, she suffered a severe paralytic illness -- possibly of 
psychosomatic origin.  Unable to walk for almost three years, she pursued the 
mathematical studies she loved and became an accomplished musician and 
linguist.  Like most young ladies of her social class, she was taught by 
tutors -- some of whom were eminent scientists and mathematicians, such as 
Augustus De Morgan, a family friend.

At 19, Ada married William King (created Lord Lovelace three years later).  
Her mother became the dominant and domineering figure in the marriage, forming 
a kind of ruling partnership with Ada's husband -- the covert reason being 
that Ada -- whose mercurial Byronic temperament they wished to control -- must 
be kept busy and out of mischief.  Together they freed Ada from many of the 
usual feminine social and family responsibilities so that she would have time 
to carve out a mathematical and scientific career; but, tragically, the 
countess's health never allowed her to progress as far as she would have 
liked.

After the birth of her third child, and about the time her notes on the 
Menabrea paper were published (when she was 29), she began to suffer both a 
physical and mental breakdown.  Because she was subject to frequent digestive 
and breathing problems, her doctor advised her to use various dangerous 
combinations of brandy, wine, beer, opium, and morphine, which led to serious 
personality disorders, including delusions to the effect that her mind -- 
admittedly brilliant -- could comprehend the secrets of the universe and make 
her God's prophet on Earth.

After some years, she came to recognize that drugs were disastrous to her 
equilibrium and managed to shake off the addition through sheer will power -- 
only to fall victim to a new obsession: horse race gambling.  Since highborn 
ladies did not deal directly with bookmakers, she used a servant and Babbage 
as go-betweens.  Unbeknownst to Babbage at first, she ran into catastrophic 
debt, pawned family jewels, and became the target of blackmailers who 
threatened public exposure.  Her husband, when he learned of her difficulties, 
stood by her; but consequent family squabbles among Ada, Lord Lovelace, and 
Ada's mother brought permanent estrangement on all sides.

To add to her torment, Ada was suffering from internal cancer, to which she 
succumbed in 1852 at the age of 36.  She was buried, at her request, beside 
Lord Byron in the Byron family vault.  If there is one bright spot in the 
darkness of her last years, it is that she had finally come to understand and 
accept her own identity, and that of the father she had been taught to 
despise.

References

V. R. Huskey and H. D. Huskey, "Lady Lovelace and Charles Babbage," Annals of 
the History of Computing, Vol. 2, No. 4, October, 1980.

C. L. James, "Ada: They Named a Language After her", Softalk, Vol. 2, November 
1981.

D. L. Moor, Ada, Countess of Lovelace (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 
1977)

M. Moseley, Irascible Genius: The Life of Charles Babbage (Chicago: Henry 
Regnery Company, 1962).

About the authors

Freelance writer Carol L. James has written a number of articles on computer 
subjects.  Duncan E. Morrill, a computer scientist, is the author of several 
technical papers on computers and software.  They are currently [January 1983] 
at work on a more comprehensive study of the countess's involvement in 
protoprogramming.

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