A Pascal Subset of Ada (was: Why Ada is Failing Socially)

[larryc@poe.jpl.nasa.gov (Larry Carroll)]

Someone said something like
> A better comparison would be between Pascal & Ada.

I came to Ada from a Pascal background, & never understood why people thought
it a complex or difficult language.  I was writing working code within a
week.  Within a month the basics had become engrained in my thinking so I
automatically used syntax correctly most of the time.  I started using
features like packages, which I thought (& still think) was a marvelous
invention & had absolutely no trouble with.  Other parts of Ada caused me
more problems, & I've never used tasking.

One of the biggest mistakes of AJPO (or whoever made the decision) was to
disallow Ada subsets.  I think they should have allowed ONE subset, 
corresponding roughly to Pascal and including packages.  We would have had 
inexpensive & commercially useful compilers much earlier, & disposed of the 
"Ada is huge" mindset.

As a footnote, when I later learned C I organized programs as much like 
packages as I could with the limited capabilites of C.  I ended up with 
patterns that look a bit like C++.