It's a seriously nice language --- it feels like a mature, well-thought-out C++ without a lot of the craziness and ancient edge cases. There are moments of sheer brilliance: the pointer scoping semantics mean that it's actually _syntactically invalid_ to leak pointers from an inner stack frame to an outer one. Its tasking and concurrency support is amazingly good. Having proper nested functions are amazing. The type system, while no Haskell, is easily good enough to say things like 'bounded array of tagged unions with length not known at compile time', with both compile and run-time error detection. And all this produces code that performs on a par with a modern C++ compiler!
Here's a multithreaded Mandelbrot renderer what I wrote: http://ideone.com/a1ky4l Note that each thread is a scoped object nested inside a function, communicating with each other via strongly typed and named messages --- startup and shutdown synchronisation happens automatically...
That's not to say there aren't warts; the OO system is pretty painful, with some annoying hidden requirements (e.g. you have to define a class' methods adjacent to the class structure itself, otherwise the compiler gets confused; if this is a requirement there should be explicit syntax for it). Having case insensitive identifiers is a complete failure. Exceptions are just plain clunky. There are a number of syntactic weirdnesses where the language got expanded beyond the original syntax' ability to cope. But the big omission is that there's no garbage collector, even though the language was obviously designed to have one. It would be so, so much nicer to write real code in if it had one.
Ada really deserves to be better known than it is.
There is at least one error in your "About Ada" section. The language was not designed by the Department of Defense, though it did meet specifications laid out by DoD called the Steelman. The language was designed by Jean Ichbiah and his team at CII Honeywell-Bull for a competition held by the High-Order Language Working Group, a group within the DoD. Four languages were submitted: Red, Yellow, Blue and Green, of which Green won and became Ada.
It's a seriously nice language --- it feels like a mature, well-thought-out C++ without a lot of the craziness and ancient edge cases. There are moments of sheer brilliance: the pointer scoping semantics mean that it's actually _syntactically invalid_ to leak pointers from an inner stack frame to an outer one. Its tasking and concurrency support is amazingly good. Having proper nested functions are amazing. The type system, while no Haskell, is easily good enough to say things like 'bounded array of tagged unions with length not known at compile time', with both compile and run-time error detection. And all this produces code that performs on a par with a modern C++ compiler!
Here's a multithreaded Mandelbrot renderer what I wrote: http://ideone.com/a1ky4l Note that each thread is a scoped object nested inside a function, communicating with each other via strongly typed and named messages --- startup and shutdown synchronisation happens automatically...
That's not to say there aren't warts; the OO system is pretty painful, with some annoying hidden requirements (e.g. you have to define a class' methods adjacent to the class structure itself, otherwise the compiler gets confused; if this is a requirement there should be explicit syntax for it). Having case insensitive identifiers is a complete failure. Exceptions are just plain clunky. There are a number of syntactic weirdnesses where the language got expanded beyond the original syntax' ability to cope. But the big omission is that there's no garbage collector, even though the language was obviously designed to have one. It would be so, so much nicer to write real code in if it had one.
Ada really deserves to be better known than it is.