[m463]

When I wrote Ada code long ago, it was only used on military projects.

To me, it was hard to write code in Ada. Lots of niceties from other languages were unavailable in Ada, by design. For example there were no variable argument lists.

It grew on me though, and several years later I worked on a commercial project that used Ada. I was surprised because I expected adopting Ada to be like adopting the adopting the tax code.

Then I realized one thing - although Ada is harder to write, it is nice to have an existing Ada project. And people who have done Ada a while learn to think in Ada and it's not as hard to be expressive.

It's also possible to be pretty accurate in Ada. You can know exactly what the largest or smallest integer is. Moreover you can define integers of a specific range, like -11 to 219.

Nowadays all of that has matured and I think ada is a viable commercial language, and interesting things like spark have happened.

Too bad in the intervening years other languages haven't changed much.

For example, C could have added modules. I guess nobody cares about C.

[pjmlp]

I think that by Ada 95 they were already available, were you still using Ada 83?

Yeah, just check the list of features for C2X, WG14 isn't that keen in innovating that much, nor in fixing C's flaws.

[bpyne]

I notice that Ada 95 included inheritance. My experience in other languages with inheritance is that the feature creates a lot of complexity. Have you used inheritance in Ada and, if so, has it created any issues?

[kqr]

The problem with many other languages is that they do everything through inheritance. In most popular languages, inheritance is set up such that it does anything you want it to. This is what creates complexity, not the inheritance in and of itself.

Ada does things slightly differently. It manages to separate out the various parts of OOP into different language constructs, and this makes it possible to pick and choose what you need, and not get everything including the kitchen sink when you try to use one thing (like inheritance.)

[pjmlp]

I use OOP languages since I learned OOP with Turbo Pascal 5.5 back in 1991.

So no, I never had any big deal with inheritance in any language, and in what concerns Ada its tag based dispatch is also quite interesting as idea.