From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.6 (2021-04-09) on ip-172-31-74-118.ec2.internal X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=3.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.6 Path: eternal-september.org!reader02.eternal-september.org!news.misty.com!border2.nntp.dca1.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!buffer2.nntp.dca1.giganews.com!buffer1.nntp.dca1.giganews.com!news.giganews.com.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2021 12:05:01 -0500 From: Dennis Lee Bieber Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Ada versus Pascal Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2021 13:05:01 -0400 Organization: IISS Elusive Unicorn Message-ID: <6pq5ngtioomfo2depk1ickvbdmleuqq16i@4ax.com> References: User-Agent: ForteAgent/8.00.32.1272 X-No-Archive: yes MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Usenet-Provider: http://www.giganews.com X-Trace: sv3-QFwJUyQkK0YHafZhe6ZhUrmfe4ktsr9Zce7J32Oq0Cc6Cc4V2e2IgJjHQvDt+HD+900b7g/ZPdY1/0/!kIJ6OcTmHAufJDKjh8ViEXptqk+9oHUNh7BgzXYAwqwGlejUgPVhmRKZmnpWzPOGsKJEZIxh X-Complaints-To: abuse@giganews.com X-DMCA-Notifications: http://www.giganews.com/info/dmca.html X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.40 X-Original-Bytes: 3308 Xref: reader02.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:63056 List-Id: On Thu, 21 Oct 2021 22:29:15 -0500, 711 Spooky Mart <711@spooky.mart> declaimed the following: >The little snippets of Ada code I've seen look _alot_ like Pascal. > No surprise. The teams that took part in the DoD competition to design a language to replace the mish-mash of languages being used in the 70s tended to choose Pascal as the starting point (Modula-2 hadn't escaped ETH-Zurich yet ). The main difference is that Ada incorporated block closing syntax at the base, finding Pascal (and C) [begin/end, {/} respectively] usage error-prone (dangling else, etc.) along with using ; as a terminator instead of separator. Oh, and using (/) for both function arguments and array indexing (back then, most US keypunches didn't support [/] or {/} ). Declarations do not have a defined sequence (type, constant, variable). Also, Pascal of the era typically did not support separate compilation and/or include files -- programs were all single monolithic files, any change required recompiling the entire program. Pascal also had a relatively limited I/O system -- with the bad quirk that it did "pre-reads" of files. Made interactive/console programs difficult (or required special handling by the run-time startup) -- starting a program would result in stdin reading at the least one character, if not one line, into the file buffer variable... But the program may not want the data until after lots of initialization and prompts. >What degree of learning curve is there to learn Ada, coming from a >Pascal background? What kind of rough timeframes to get comfortable with >programming without always looking to the manuals? > If all one is writing is "Pascal" type applications, without using complex data types (ie; defining specific types for each "concept") -- it shouldn't take too long. Tasking, rendezvous, protected objects (not to be confused with private objects), and generics, may take longer to get comfortable with. The appendices of the LRM will tend to get lots of usage; there are many subtleties to the standard libraries. -- Wulfraed Dennis Lee Bieber AF6VN wlfraed@ix.netcom.com http://wlfraed.microdiversity.freeddns.org/