Ada's designers directly referenced Pascal's design and Wirth's theses to create Ada. They themselves call it a Wirth-language, as it follow's Wirth's principals.

Anecdotally, as someone who has coded extensively in Pascal (particularly the Object Pascal variant) and also (though, less so) in Ada; I'm baffled as to how anyone could look at the two and say they're only "marginally related". They're so similar that they're grouped together in much the manner C/C++ are, though Ada took a much harder compatibility break than C++ did:

https://p2ada.sourceforge.net/pascada.htm

> Well, what is that Ada language ? For here, it suffices to write: a superset of Pascal with some syntactical differences. Or a Super-Pascal. Or, a Pascal on steroids. In fact it's a better, redesigned language strongly inspired by Pascal. You'll see what I mean in the examples.

Pascal preceded Ada, but does not allow for coverage of most of the specialized topics that Ada does. For nearly every Pascal concept Ada took a different approach. Similarities are rather superficial.

To quote from https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/956653.956654:

"Pascal itself only meets a small part of the Steelman requirements. Merely to attempt to extend Pascal would have been neither feasible nor a desirable approach. [...] Hence, the goal in the design of the Green language was to retain the Pascal spirit of simplicity and elegance but not necessarily the form of each Pascal feature"

So it's neither a "superset of Pascal" nor a "Pascal on steroids", but a new language design which meets (or better tried to meet since it is much more complex than Pascal) the "spirit of simplicitly" for completely different and much more complex requirements than Pascal did. It's definitely not a "Wirth language" and I don't know of any statement by Ichbiah where he would call it that way.

> In fact it's a better, redesigned language strongly inspired by Pascal.

Is the point you should have zeroed in on, not the thrown away comments. If you had, you would realize everyone is saying the same thing as you.

> It's definitely not a "Wirth language"

I specifically stated in my original comment that it was indirectly so, via it's Pascal lineage. If you want to jump through hoops to disavow it of it's clear and self-avowed forebear, go for it. There's nothing to be gained from continuing down this line of argumentation for me.

For some reason you seem to assume that taking inspiration from a language necessarily leads to a very similar language; there is no reason for this assumption; the language authors themselves have told us in the Rationale in what way they were inspired (see the quote in my previous comment). Those who consider Pascal and Ada to be very similar should study both languages more intensively, and not draw their conclusion from a few superficial features; furthermore, they fail to recognize the enormous difference in scope; Pascal offers a small fraction of the features of Ada and cannot be very similar for this reason alone.

Here is a simple example; both Pascal und its descendants suffered and still suffer from the dangling else problem; Ada solved this by adding end if and elsif, i.e. by integrating structured statements with blocks (Wirth himself came to a similar solution in Modula); superficially you still see the same Pascal keywords, but it's a different and much better approach.

Ada is neither indirectly a Wirth language; Wirth had nothing to do with it at all and came to quite different solutions in his later languages than the Ada authors.

I didn't assume anything, my point and reasoning was laid out and provided. You can disagree with it all you like, I don't care.

My opinion doesn't matter; it's what the facts say.