From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=unavailable autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Received: by 10.224.86.200 with SMTP id t8mr7116778qal.0.1372938501676; Thu, 04 Jul 2013 04:48:21 -0700 (PDT) X-Received: by 10.49.5.106 with SMTP id r10mr129562qer.11.1372938501633; Thu, 04 Jul 2013 04:48:21 -0700 (PDT) Path: eternal-september.org!reader01.eternal-september.org!reader02.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!mx05.eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!news.mb-net.net!open-news-network.org!usenet.blueworldhosting.com!feeder01.blueworldhosting.com!news.glorb.com!t19no325905qam.0!news-out.google.com!f7ni806qai.0!nntp.google.com!t19no333989qam.0!postnews.google.com!glegroupsg2000goo.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: Thu, 4 Jul 2013 04:48:21 -0700 (PDT) In-Reply-To: Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: glegroupsg2000goo.googlegroups.com; posting-host=82.154.106.50; posting-account=nd46uAkAAAB2IU3eJoKQE6q_ACEyvPP_ NNTP-Posting-Host: 82.154.106.50 References: User-Agent: G2/1.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 Message-ID: Subject: Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist? From: john@peppermind.com Injection-Date: Thu, 04 Jul 2013 11:48:21 +0000 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Xref: news.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:16102 Date: 2013-07-04T04:48:21-07:00 List-Id: > Is there a reason why I may want to prefer Ada over Object Pascal (again,= remembering that I am just a hobbyist)? I'm a hobbyist and currently use Ada for one of my projects. Anyway, there = is no general answer to your question, because it depends on what you want = to program.=20 If you want to write proprietary GUI applications, FreePascal/Lazarus seems= to be the a good choice. If you're looking for long-term maintainability, want to be able to compile= and understand your program in ten years from now, Ada will be better. In terms of learning, I'd say that Ada and FreePascal are on a par. Ada has= a few initial hurdles - it took me quite a while to understand how generic= s work and tasking is more complicated than in other languages because it i= s properly defined and not just wrapped around OS threads. Overall, my expe= rience is that Ada is easy to learn, especially since you will in practise = only use a few of its features most of the time. However, Pascal dialects a= re also easy to learn, as I remember from TurboPascal a long long time ago.= =20 To summarize, your question is impossible to answer without more details on= what kind of programs you intend to write. Of course, it'll hard to get un= biased answers to these kind of questions on an Ada newsgroup, you should p= erhaps consider asking this at a general programming forum. P.S. One big advantage of Ada over any other language I've tried (and I've = tried many) is that it tends to catch errors during compilation - it takes = longer to get a program to compile, but once it compiles it usually works. = I spend almost no time on debugging.