Ada is such an underrated language. The lack of its adoption is a testament to the old adage that technologies don't thrive or die on their technical merits.

The late arrival of a Free and Open Source compiler certainly didn't help its adoption in Free and Open Source circles.

I remember reading a discussion on it in a year around <= 2000 and it was a general consensus that Ada’s printed standard is too heavy to move around, let alone implement. Military/corporate-ish affinity didn’t help either.

I see pi-e-sigma beat me to it, but:

C++ is at least as complicated as Ada, both in terms of using the language and in terms of writing a compiler for it.

C++ also sees plenty of use in military applications. The F-35's 141 page C++ coding standard is publicly available, for instance.

https://www.stroustrup.com/JSF-AV-rules.pdf

Compare C++ and Ada. C++ standard is an order of magnitude bigger and more complex and yet C++ is thriving. So Ada's failure definitively is not due to the language complexity. C++ has been supported heavily by the corporate, too. Biggest C++ champion was Microsoft, after all.

What about using the same associative operator multiple times?

A + B + C is permitted in Ada.

https://learn.adacore.com/courses/Ada_For_The_CPP_Java_Devel...

If I read this right, Zig follows Pony partially. The very basic stuff like addition and multiplication follows the well known precedence rules („chainable“), but eg bitwise operators whose precedence nobody can remember must be put into parentheses.

I find this a good compromise between being explicit and readability (Lisp syndrome).