Suggestions to a Newbie

[tmoran@bix.com]

>1) A starter's book for a programmer with solid experience in programming
Barnes' and Cohen's books, as mentioned elsewhere, and various others.
See www.adapower.com

>2) A compiler for Windows NT, with a dedicated IDE. Free or commercial
Look at www.adapower.com for a list of the compilers for Windows.  The
only one you can get for $0 with source code is Gnat.  You can get
either Gnat or ObjectAda (limited version) without support for $0.
There are other compilers (listed there) with various price schedules
and with various features you may find desirable or undesirable.

>Is there a Standard library for Ada?
  Yes, but it's fairly basic.

>Are the libraries provided with Ada portable across several platforms,
  Depends.  The Standard defined libraries should be.  But of course
each vendor, and lots of other folks, offers various extra stuff which
may or may not be portable.  A Legendre function routine is likely
portable (though perhaps with varying accuracy).  A multi-tasking sort
might be portable, but have very different performance on different
hardware.  A library to help make Windows programs is unlikely to work
at all on Unix.