Re: Ada design bug or GNAT bug?

[Shark8 <onewingedshark@gmail.com>]

On Monday, June 22, 2015 at 11:39:17 AM UTC-6, Randy Brukardt wrote:
> 
> What part of "anonymous access types are evil" did you fail to understand?? 
> :-) The mistake I regret more than any other was allowing their use to be 
> expanded, for a purpose that doesn't really work, with semantics that are 
> far more complex than anyone really wanted.

Yes, anonymous accesses ARE pretty bad.
But this does bring up the question: what missteps have been made in Ada's design?

Here's a few I can think of: 
* Ada's lack of the ability to derive from a private type in the same package. (Aspects now allow us to specify the interface info [like Size or convention] at the point of declaration; arguably in a new language this would be required in some new Ada-derived language where the defaults are altered.)
* Ada's inability to define subtypes on an enumeration where the enumeration has a representation-clause in the private part.
* Ada95's modular types combine the orthogonal idea of a cyclic numeric type and an unsigned type -- conceptually it could have been better to separate the two.
* Ada95's Representation clauses lack the ability to specify byte-order, though they do offer bit-order.
* The lack of a "abstract type" that could be used to unify (e.g.) [[Wide_[Wide_]]String into a single "generic"/abstract type; ditto on Character.