Ada++ Wants To Make The Ada Programming Language More Accessible

[CommunityMember]

It is too bad that ADA never really caught on outside of the aircraft and missile industries.

In the early 90's DoD required ADA for their systems, but there was an exception process. And many projects used it (making the requirement more of a paperwork exercise, except, perhaps, for those projects under a cost plus contract where increased costs were not necessarily a bad thing). In the late 90's the requirement was effectively eliminated.

[Luke_Wolf]

I bet Rust was inspired by kernel typedefs like u32 and s32.
https://kernelnewbies.org/InternalKernelDataTypes

The rust language designers have noted C# as an influence on their language design so it's more likely the inspiration comes from there, given they were doing it as the norm well before it was cool (2002), and everyone else was just sticking to C language conventions.

[uid313]

++ operator in safety critical language. Seriously?

What's wrong with the ++ operator?
It's not like it is dangerous, hard to understand or is weird?
It is just syntactic sugar for i += 1, which is syntactic sugar for for i = i + 1

[RamaSpaceShip]

These additions are useless for a language like Ada.

If you want Ada to be more widely used, first train developers to safe programming and long term maintainability.
They will naturally understand that Ada is the best language.

The main problem of Ada is that you must un-learn the bad habits you have learnt with other languages before being able to write good Ada code.
This takes too long for most people.

[mb_q]

I like how they went Int_32, Int_64 and so on, but I think Rust really nailed that with i32/u32, i64/u64... (I'm not aware whether other language did that before Rust, if they did, hats off.)

I don't know if this is a true origin, but my personal theory is that it came from LLVM IR, which has i<n> symbol for n-bit integer, and Rust basically compiles to it. Though, there is no u<n> since there are operations that are signed or unsigned there. Also floats are called as in C, float, double, etc., not f<N>.

[polarathene]

If you want Ada to be more widely used, first train developers to safe programming and long term maintainability.
They will naturally understand that Ada is the best language.

What benefits does Ada have over Rust? Asking as a dev with experience writing Rust code but not that familiar with Ada which has apparently been around for decades. I assume the developer experience isn't as good, but does Ada offer any advantages over Rust?

[ssokolow]

What benefits does Ada have over Rust? Asking as a dev with experience writing Rust code but not that familiar with Ada which has apparently been around for decades. I assume the developer experience isn't as good, but does Ada offer any advantages over Rust?

I don't want to copy-paste them in their entirety, but take a look at this post and this post on the Rust users forum.

[tuxd3v]

It resembles the Lua Language,
but they maintained the ";" after each sentence,( in Lua you can do the same without them, if you change line "\n".. or continue using them if you want too.. )
Even the line comments are the same as in Lua..

[bug77]

C99 has int32_t uin32_t int64_t etc.

And that's a lot of unnecessary characters

mb_q Rust certainly has f32 and f64.

[jacob]

I don't think that the main hindrance on Ada's adoption was having to type 'begin' instead of {. Of course if network services, among others, were written in Ada instead of C, we would have much less security problems and the Internet would be a lot better place, but it's too late for that now. The ecosystem (FOSS included) has moved on and none of the tooling, frameworks, runtimes etc. are Ada-friendly.

Since it looks like Rust now has all the momentum for safety or security-critical code, maybe the best way forward would be for it to incorporate those useful features from Ada that it's currently missing, mainly first class support for range types, generic modules and custom memory allocation (getting there with the placement operator?).