I know this is tangent, but as someone who hasn't programmed Ada, I'm struck by how the superficial syntax of VHDL is similar to Ada. See: http://en.wikipedia.

I know this is tangent, but as someone who hasn't programmed Ada, I'm struck by how the superficial syntax of VHDL is similar to Ada. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHDL#Design_examples http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHDL#Design_examples vs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_programming_language#Language_constructs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_programming_language#Langua... Same "use packagename". Same "entity foo is", same block definition by "begin [...] end entity" Coincidence, or is there a historical reason for this? Edit: The answer was in the VHDL article itself: "Due to the Department of Defense requiring as much of the syntax as possible to be based on Ada, in order to avoid re-inventing concepts that had already been thoroughly tested in the development of Ada,[citation needed] VHDL borrows heavily from the Ada programming language in both concepts and syntax."