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

["Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)" <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr>]

Le Tue, 27 Aug 2013 18:50:20 +0200, Simon Clubley  
<clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-earth.ufp> a écrit:

> On 2013-08-27, Yannick Duchêne <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr> wrote:
>> Le Sat, 06 Jul 2013 09:04:12 +0200, Dufr <dufriz@gmail.com> a écrit:
>>
>>> The reasons you guys gave in favor of Ada are all pretty solid, no
>>> doubt. And yet, I am not fully convinced yet, because:
>>>
>>> a hobbiyst learner needs a lot of support, and from what I have seen
>>> Object Pascal (in the form of Free Pascal) has a much larger community
>>> of enthusiasts than Ada, with a very active forum.
>>
>> Free Pascal, whose semantic depends on compile time option? Not sure  
>> it's
>> a good bet? (not to mention the documentation which is not always in  
>> sync
>> with what the compiler really do).
>>
>
> The problem is that the good support is more important to some learners
> than a technically better language.
>
> I've had a look at the Free Pascal support channels in the past and they
> appear to be very friendly (for the most part) and understanding of what
> a person wants to achieve.

On that precise point, my personal experience gave me an opposite feeling.  
I remember I've re‑opened a bug report two times (before I gave up). This  
was something the documentation said, and the compiler did something else,  
and that was on a topic as important as visibility of object methods. I  
opened a bug report saying either the compiler must implement the  
“specification” as stated in the documentation, or the documentation must  
be updated to match what the compiler do. The answer I get was that none  
of the two will be done and the report was closed immediately. As this was  
looking totally silly to me and could not believe it, I reopened it two  
times, with some insistence to repeat either the documentation had to be  
updated or the compiler fixed, and asking if it was really necessary to  
fork FPK (they did not enjoyed this sentence) to get a compiler doing what  
the documentation says, with same result.

Not friendly at all and no understanding neither, and to me, it was not  
serious.

That's precisely this incident (a big one to me at that time), which made  
me seek for another option. I learned about Oberon (the language and the  
OS), Modula (misc variants), and Ada, which I already knew in the past but  
I did not understood at the moment. I finally decided to choose Ada,  
because Oberon and Modula looked dead to me and because of the existence  
of an ISO standard.

-- 
“Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semi-colons.” [1]
“Structured Programming supports the law of the excluded muddle.” [1]
[1]: Epigrams on Programming — Alan J. — P. Yale University