Rational Machines was founded by Paul Levy and Mike Devlin in 1981 to provide tools to expand the use of modern software engineering practices, particularly explicit modular architecture and iterative development. Rational was sold for US$2.1 billion to IBM on February 20, 2003. First released in 1985, the Rational Environment was an integrated development environment for the Ada programming language, which provided good support for abstraction through strong typing. Its goal was to provide the productivity benefits associated with academic single-user programming environments to teams of... developers developing mission-critical applications that could execute on a range of computing platforms. The Rational Environment was organized around a persistent intermediate representation , providing users with syntactic and semantic completion, incremental compilation, and integrated configuration management and version control.
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