International audienceSCADE is a high-level language and environment for developing safety critical embedded control software. It is used for more than twenty years in various application domains like avionics, nuclear plants, transportation, automotive. SCADE has been founded on the synchronous data-flow language Lustre invented by Caspi and Halbwachs. In the early years, it was mainly seen as a graphical notation for Lustre but with the unique and key addition of a code generator qualified with the highest standards for safety critical applications.In 2008, a major revision based on the new language 'Scade 6' was released. This language originally combines the Lustre data-flow style with control structures borrowed from Esterel and SyncCharts, compilation and static analyses from Lucid Synchrone to ensure safety properties. This expressiveness increase for SCADE together with a qualified code generator have dramatically widened the scope of applications developed with.While previous publications have described some of its language constructs and compiler algorithms, no reference publication on 'Scade 6' existed so far. In this paper, we come back to the decisions made for its design, illustrate the main language features, static analyses, and the compiler organization in the context of a qualification process
