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From: Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: How to make Ada popular. Get rid of ";" at end of statement.
Date: Sat, 20 Jul 2019 01:42:14 -0700
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Date: 2019-07-20T01:42:14-07:00
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"J-P. Rosen" <rosen@adalog.fr> writes:
> It's not because someone posts an unsupported stupid claim that it has
> to be followed... Python's idea of using indentation for range of
> statements is a typical false good idea.

It's certainly not about the semicolons, but Python code is very concise
and fluid to write.  It's also easy to learn and has a pleasant
interactive testing environment.  Lisp had similar attractions in an
earlier era, and it still does for some.

Python's indentation-based syntax is mostly a good thing though they did
paint themselves into a corner a few times.  Haskell has something
similar called "layout" where you can use indentation as an alternative
to curly brace syntax.  Haskell's version works better than Python's in
my opinion.

Python doesn't really try to compete in Ada's space of very big, highly
reliable, high performance systems.  It's for quickly banging out
something that is not too complicated, and that basically works or is
easy to fix when it throws an error.  In Ada circles that is sometimes
called rapid prototyping.

Here's a familiar old paper (you may have seen it) about a rapid
prototyping experiment comparing Haskell, Ada, and other languages:

  https://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~apt/cs457_2005/hudak-jones.pdf

The Ada solution for that problem needed around 10x as much code as the
Haskell solution.  Python wasn't included, but Python code for the same
problem would have looked fairly similar to the Haskell code.