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0 pointsJtsummers4y ago0 comments

Even setting aside keywords, the real verbosity with Ada is that nearly everything is explicit, not implicit. In C you have many implicit conversions between (similar) types, in Ada these are always explicit. In C++ you have implicit instantiation of templates when they get used, in Ada you must explicitly instantiate a generic before it's used.

On the other hand, arrays carry their range information with them and you don't need to pass that explicitly like in C. And having types with explicit ranges means you can use them and trust that they'll work correctly (which may include erroring out when used incorrectly, like adding 1 to the largest value), but in most other languages you'd have to include explicit range checks at (potentially) numerous locations throughout the code (did we start with a correct value, did we end with a correct value).

Tradeoffs.

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adrian_b4y ago

You are right.

However the Department of Defense requirements prohibited any kind of implicit conversions, without making any distinction between safe conversions, which preserve the value and which are reversible, and unsafe conversions, like truncations or roundings or signed to unsigned conversions.

The complete lack in Ada of some very frequently needed implicit conversions is annoying and it does not decrease the likelihood of bugs, but it increases the likelihood of bugs due to code bloat that can obscure the erroneous absence of some meaningful operation.

However, this defect is on DoD, not on the Ada authors.

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