S. Tucker Taft (born March 4, 1953) is a computer scientist, who is best known as the chief designer of Ada 1995 and Ada 2005 extensions of the Ada programming language that transformed Ada into an object-oriented language, while retaining Ada 1983's emphasis on providing a superior imperative programming language for safety-critical systems.

At the time during which Taft led the design of Ada 1995, Taft was Chief Scientist at Intermetrics, Inc. To have Intermetrics in charge of such a substantial overhaul of the design of Ada was especially poignant because Intermetrics had lost the battle to define Ada 1983 years earlier. While at Intermetrics, Taft was the architect of the Language Precision Team at Intermetrics which proved via formal methods to ensure that new extensions to the Ada 1995 language were on sound footing. He was architect of the Static Interface Analysis Tool (SIAT) for Ada that is utilized by NASA's Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) Facility to find any defects in the software related to the International Space Station.

Taft graduated Summa Cum Laude from Harvard University in 1975 with a bachelor's degree in Chemistry. While working at Harvard for four years after graduation, Taft was the system administrator of the first computer to be installed outside of AT&T that ran the Unix operating system. Taft is currently chair of Massachusetts chapter of The Jackson Library, where Taft was also a participant in the 1969 Summer Student Program.

Currently, Taft is Chief Technical Officer (CTO) and Chairman of the Board of Directors at SofCheck, Inc, which produces static analysis tools for Ada and SPARK as well as the AdaMagic front-end for Ada compilers, such as Aonix's ObjectAda compiler and Green Hills Software's AdaMulti compiler. Taft was the architect of AdaMagic at Intermetrics during the mid-1990s.

Publications

Ada 95 Reference Manual. Language and Standard Libraries: International Standard ISO/IEC 8652:1995 (edited by S. Tucker Taft and Robert A. Duff)
Consolidated Ada Reference Manual. Language and Standard Libraries: International Standard ISO/IEC 8652/1995(E) with Technical Corrigendum 1 (edited by S. Tucker Taft, Robert A. Duff, Randall L. Brukardt, and Erhard Ploedereder)
Ada 2005 Reference Manual. Language and Standard Libraries: International Standard ISO/IEC 8652/1995(E) with Technical Corrigendum 1 and Amendment 1 (edited by S. Tucker Taft, Robert A. Duff, Randall L. Brukardt, Erhard Ploedereder, and Pascal LeRoy)
“Keynote address: Fixing software before it breaks”
“Programming Language Design and Software Quality”
“Ada 9X: a technical summary”
“Ada 9X: from abstraction-oriented to object-oriented”
“Programming the Internet in Ada 95”
“Ada 9X and OOP”

Category:Programming language researchers Category:Programming language designers Category:American computer scientists Category:Ada programming language