Re: Object Pascal vs Ada -- which is better for a hobbyist?

[john@peppermind.com]

> Is there a reason why I may want to prefer Ada over Object Pascal (again, remembering that I am just a hobbyist)?

I'm a hobbyist and currently use Ada for one of my projects. Anyway, there is no general answer to your question, because it depends on what you want to program. 

If you want to write proprietary GUI applications, FreePascal/Lazarus seems to be the a good choice.

If you're looking for long-term maintainability, want to be able to compile and understand your program in ten years from now, Ada will be better.

In terms of learning, I'd say that Ada and FreePascal are on a par. Ada has a few initial hurdles - it took me quite a while to understand how generics work and tasking is more complicated than in other languages because it is properly defined and not just wrapped around OS threads. Overall, my experience is that Ada is easy to learn, especially since you will in practise only use a few of its features most of the time. However, Pascal dialects are also easy to learn, as I remember from TurboPascal a long long time ago. 

To summarize, your question is impossible to answer without more details on what kind of programs you intend to write. Of course, it'll hard to get unbiased answers to these kind of questions on an Ada newsgroup, you should perhaps consider asking this at a general programming forum.

P.S. One big advantage of Ada over any other language I've tried (and I've tried many) is that it tends to catch errors during compilation - it takes longer to get a program to compile, but once it compiles it usually works. I spend almost no time on debugging.