Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[Jeffrey Carter <spam.jrcarter.not@spam.not.acm.org>]

On 07/03/2013 11:59 PM, Dufr wrote:
> Which is better for an amateur programmer, Object Pascal or Ada?
>
> My worry about Ada is that it will entail too much overhead in terms of learning, because of the strict rules, whereas programming in Object Pascal is said to be easier. Or, at least, this is what I have heard.
> Is my understanding correct?
>
> Is there a reason why I may want to prefer Ada over Object Pascal (again, remembering that I am just a hobbyist)?

In a controlled experiment, the US Military Academy (West Point) found that Ada 
(95) was a better language for their 1st programming class than Pascal:

http://www.sigada.org/conf/sa98/papers/murtagh.pdf

Ada was based originally on Pascal, and corrected a number of deficiencies in 
the language. For example, semicolon errors, fairly common in Pascal, where the 
semicolon is a statement separator, are practically nonexistent in Ada, where 
the semicolon is a statement terminator.

If you want to utilize more than one core at a time, you'll find Ada's 
high-level tasking concepts easier to understand and far less error prone than a 
low-level library, or even the threading concepts of Java.

-- 
Jeff Carter
"Propose to an Englishman any principle, or any instrument, however
admirable, and you will observe that the whole effort of the English
mind is directed to find a difficulty, a defect, or an impossibility
in it. If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will
pronounce it impossible: if you peel a potato with it before his eyes,
he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple."
Charles Babbage
92