Re:Introduction to Ada
by TedDallas on Wednesday September 02, 2020 @11:49PM
(#24360647)
Nice documentation. Ada looks a lot like Pascal. It is interesting that SPARK is a subset of subset of Ada.
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It's Pascal inspired but certainly not any of Wirth's syntaxes, like 1/2 line if's, semi colons in weird places making blocks look odd. Ada has a more inclusive syntax, whereby "is" or "begin" and "end" encases what is inside it. Compare Modula's:
MODULE X;
...
END MODULE X.
and Ada's: package X is
...
end X;
Ada's package feels like one statement containing others, whereby Modula's looks like it ends on the first line.That difference may be due to ";" being considered a statement separator in Pascal, and a statement terminator in Ada. https://wiki.haskell.org/Terminator_vs._separator
Yeah when I learned Ada in college it seemed like it was a better Pascal, including fixing the quirky inconsistent termination.
Re:Introduction to Ada
by non-entity on Thursday September 03, 2020 @12:56AM
(#24360909)
Pascal-like syntax seemed to have been popular around the time. Outside the Writh languages(Pascal, Modula, Oberon) and Ada, I was reading about CHILL[0] the other day, which is supposedly similar to Ada, but was rather domain specific. Sadly I don't think any modern, free implementations exist.
Pascal is a simplification from ALGOL, so it is actually most ALGOL derived languages.
C description tends to refer to ALGOL influence, but it just boils down to structured programming and the data types. Syntax has nothing from ALGOL.
VHDL has a quite similar syntax, too.