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Petty and inconsequential as this sounds, I'm convinced Ada go have gone farther if it didn't have capitals and underscores in all their libs, and long keywords
by khazhoux 6y ago
Petty and inconsequential as this sounds, I'm convinced Ada go have gone farther if it didn't have capitals and underscores in all their libs, and long keywords like `procedure`. All that shift-key action makes Ada a physically painful language to work in.
- synack 6y agoOne of the "Steelman" requirements that Ada was built to satisfy was that any program should be able to be represented with a subset of ASCII that would be compatible with the largest range of terminals, teletypes, and punched cards as possible. Less relevant today, but that's why Ada has so many keywords in it's syntax.
- khazhoux 6y agoJust found this: https://blog.adacore.com/a-modern-syntax-for-ada https://blog.adacore.com/a-modern-syntax-for-ada
- synack 6y agoThat was an April Fools' joke.
- khazhoux 6y agoHa, that's what I get for posting stuff without reading it.
- protomyth 6y agoLike all good jokes, there is a grain of truth in it.
- burfog 6y agoSeriously, the curly braces are a huge improvement. That's no joke. The "fn" and ":" are good too. I'm less sure about "include", because I doubt Ada does textual inclusion. If it does, then that is good too. Otherwise, better choices might be: using, use, require, requires, depend, depends, external, library, unit, module...
- Lucretia9 6y agoI don't get this whole need to shorten keywords to 2 letters when the IDE will just autocomplete them, it's really stupid.
- kwhitefoot 6y agoNot everyone wants to write code in an IDE. Quite a lot of people prefer a text editor of some kind.
- burfog 6y agoI can't stand that autocomplete. It gets in the way of actual typing. What if I want nothing in the list? What if I actually want to use the arrow keys immediately after that thing has decided to trigger? It probably also cuts down on human ability, like never taking the training wheels off. In the long run productivity might be lower.
- kirghiz 6y agoThe point of using the end statements is to make sure the programmer knows which clause is being closed.
- Lucretia9 6y agoYou should count up how many keywords C++ has, then count the number in Ada.
- thesuperbigfrog 6y agoAssuming I counted correctly, Ada 2012 has 73 reserved words: http://www.ada-auth.org/standards/rm12_w_tc1/html/RM-2-9.html http://www.ada-auth.org/standards/rm12_w_tc1/html/RM-2-9.htm... C++ 20 has 97 keywords: https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/keyword https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/keyword
- badrabbit 6y agopeople had similar complaints about python and all the space/tab/indentation. I like to think it was not aesthetically pleasing but also, it was way ahead of it's time. If Rust was released in '95 it may not have been received as well.
- johnisgood 6y agoRust seems to flourish despite its heavy use of symbols, and I mean... heavy. Plus, code is supposed to be documentation. :)
- mosteo 6y agoThis is actually one of my few gripes with Rust. I see lots of code that starts to resemble what I call "cryptosyntax" (also a feature of C++). In this regard, Ada explicitly had maintainability as a design requirement, and I wonder how well Rust will fare with its concise, symbol-heavy code in that regard.
- EdPF 6y agoMore specifically, "readability" was the sub-goal that fell under. People were thinking about use as pseudo-code in those days as well.
- Jtsummers 6y agoAda is actually case insensitive. The uppercase isn’t strictly necessary, more convention.
- Lucretia9 6y agoAda is case insensitive, so if you really wanted to you could write it in all lower or all upper case. Although, your source would be considered hard to read.
- gmfawcett 6y agoIt's worth adding that GNAT, at least, has pretty-printing tools that will fix up casing to whatever standard you've specified in your project.