Comment by 🐝 undefined
Re: "Old Ada books are still worthwhile"
Yeah, I've recently tried the language for the first time, out of sheer curiocity, and was surprised how solid it felt. Most criticism of it doesn't seem justified at all. Though it really is very verbose, it's the only language that made me install vim snippets, typing out procedure xyz ... end xyz is just ridiculous. The contract programming to me was by far the coolest thing about it though. Having whatever assertions you want be built into types and functions is very convenient.
2024-11-30 · 1 year ago
4 Later Comments ↓
👽 TKurtBond [OP] · 2025-01-10 at 01:03:
I agree it is a bit verbose, but not to an excessive degree; Cobol, for instance, I find unpleasantly verbose, and Ada is not nearly that bad. 😀 I really appreciate that it goes for clarity rather than extreme terseness. It really does help understandability.
🐝 undefined · 2025-01-10 at 05:17:
Yeah I agree. Rationales are cool, you're right. Though to be honest, the way you program was way too different from what I'm used to in c++, so that's why I didn't stick with it. The gnat compiler is weird, too. I have no idea why they didn't just make it work like normal gcc. The compile times are much better though, because of pascal grammar I presume. Also the one thing I've noticed, is that while strict typing can be nice, it really makes refactoring much more painful than in c. Same applies to rust too actually.
🐙 norayr [mod] · 2025-01-10 at 06:56:
gnat compilation times are fast? with all due respect to gnat, that's very slow, compared to fpc (freepascal) or any ETH oberon compiler. (:
🐝 undefined · 2025-01-10 at 08:40:
@norayr no, compared to c++ or any llvm language really
Original Post
Old Ada books are still worthwhile — I had a class on Ada back in college, in the late 80s. The professor didn't really know much about Ada, certainly didn't understand the rationale of the language, so it was a fairly shallow introduction, and didn't really answer the question of WHY someone would pick Ada to use over other languages. So the general impression was of a fairly verbose language with very strict typing. (Note that I live in a very rural area and didn't have access to good...