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Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: Sat, 20 Jul 2019 07:40:54 -0700 (PDT)
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Subject: Re: How to make Ada popular. Get rid of ";" at end of statement.
From: Stephen Davies <joviangm@gmail.com>
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Xref: reader01.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:56900
Date: 2019-07-20T07:40:54-07:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

On Friday, 19 July 2019 22:42:00 UTC+1, Nasser M. Abbasi  wrote:
> According to https://hackernoon.com/best-coding-languages-to-learn-in-2019-b49b49250a25
> 
> ... I'd like to make a suggestion: Remove ";" from Ada.
> 

I don't see this as being a problem given the numerous popular
languages that do use semicolons.

But I do think that maybe Ada would be less off-putting to people
who know other languages if it adopted some constructs that are
now standard in nearly all languages, e.g.:-

Allow 0x, 0b and 0o for Hex, Bin and Octal numbers
(with an optional extra parameter in Integer_IO.Put)

Allow == for equality, though obviously only allow := for assignment
(maybe make this the preferred form, similar to how
Mixed_Case took over from UPPER_CASE)

I also think that the annoying leading-space on Integer'Image is
off-putting to newbies too because it's those early programs where
you often just want to embed a number in an output string quickly.
Would it really be that hard to add a Trim_Image attribute or add
a Width parameter to Integer'Image?

Finally, not to be entirely negative, I realy like the new @ feature
and hope it makes people looking at Ada who are used to +=, etc
think "ooh, that's nice".