Re: How difficult is ada to learn?

[Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com>]

Matthew Heaney <mheaney@on2.com> writes:

> Gene wrote:
> > Most people who start with Borland Pascal miss the built-in set and
> > string data types. Ada gets the same effects with packages, but the
> > syntax is far less elegant and readable.
> 
> Thinking about it some more, I forgot that Ada does built-in support for
> sets a la Pascal, in the form of arrays whose component subtype is
> Boolean.  There are predefined operations for and'ing, or'ing, etc.

Right.  And you normally want to use pragma Pack on that array.

Ada's array-of-boolean doesn't have the annoying restriction of Pascal
sets to a small range.  If you want 10_000 bits, that's fine in Ada,
but Pascal compilers typically won't allow it.

The Pascal syntax for sets is nicer than Ada's, though.

- Bob