Re: Why .ads as well as .adb?

[Maciej Sobczak <see.my.homepage@gmail.com>]

> There's a lot more to readability than just the "proportion of useful code".

OK, so I'll keep playing the devil's advocate. :-)

> Indeed, it is rather important that delimiters be clear and not get lost in 
> the code.

It's also important for the code not to get lost in delimiters. LISP and Ada are examples of languages where delimiters are distracting and thus cross the fine border between "visible" and "obstructing".

> (as it is a single skinny character, barely noticiable in most fonts);

Please use good fonts. There is absolutely no reason to use bad fonts for doing professional work.
And no, I don't get the argument that the language syntax has the purpose of solving the problem of bad fonts in someone's text editor. On the contrary.

> it's hard to tell the difference between that and a blank line in the above.

This is augmented with the indentation. It's very clear without being obstructing.

> And C-family code with } on separate lines is a rarity

Not in my world. Actually, this is the only style I happen to work with. This style is promoted by all industrial coding standards (both C and C++ language standards examples, MISRA-C, JSF, HICPP, AUTOSAR, ...), so I don't get the argument about "rarity".

Actually, I don't even know where to find something different.

> most 
> of it is all smushed together (more like we'd write parens in Ada).

I don't know where "most" comes from in your statistics.

> Ada strikes the critical balance between readability and consiseness.

Not in the perception of those who attempt to learn it. Ada has the reputation of being overly verbose and considering that such reputation comes from beginners after the initial contact with the language, it very likely comes exactly from the block delimiters.

> And it 
> pretty much is the only language where the language designers truly cared 
> about readability

This statement is unfounded and the word "truly" is dangerous.

-- 
Maciej Sobczak * http://www.inspirel.com