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From: mancel@techno.sk (Milan Mancel)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: How to make Ada a dominant language
Date: 30 Jul 2001 14:26:10 -0700
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Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:10785
Date: 2001-07-30T21:26:10+00:00
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I am new to Ada too, learning just for few weeks and I do not think
that there is any problem with Ada95 syntax. Well, I am not newbie to
programming, in my professional career I had to use many languages
(Fortran, Forth ...) and now I use Java, Python and C/C++ and I am
ready to try whatever interesting comes next and accept its syntax :)

When I started with Ada, I really had problem with statements like
count: integer := 0; - well maybe for five seconds. Then I accepted
that things are that way and that it is pretty logical:

- you say that count is integer and it si zero
- you see variables first and only if you need to know the type you
read the second word on the line

I think if someone is not able to grasp this simple thing will not be
able understand more important parts of Ada and it is good for him/her
not to try further.

The other thing - elimitating keyword "end" - no way! When I program
in Java, my code looks like:

public int someMethod() {
       blahblahblah
       ...
       ...
} // end someMethod

so I like Ada the way it is.

If you want indentation part of the language, just use command line
switch in gnatmake and incorrect indentation will generate an style
error - so you are forced to use the right style.

:= versus =, all the years I hate C and Java style, == is illogical. =
means equals. From historical reason C wanted to save every byte of
source code - and you assign more frequently than compare equality, so
with == for equality and = for assignment you save valuable bytes.
Thats is all to it. Problem is that programmers are acustommed to
this.

What really puts people off Ada is that they cannot hack code like in
C. In Ada you have to think first. You have to think of correct types
and subtypes for you data and variables first, otherwise you even
cannot pass them to library functions and procedures as parameters.
Ada is not good for testing algorithms or quick hacking. I think that
good combination is Python for prototyping and Ada for final code.

What I really miss is good and short example code of every Ada concept
and maybe more libraries and bindings.

Milan