[0xDEEPFAC]

> Ada, unfortunately, looks cobol-like, so someone who knows nothing automatically assumes a ton of bureaucracy. Run away if you want work done.

The Ada++ project (a modified GNAT compiler) might interest you then.

http://www.adapplang.com/

[Jtsummers]

Have you had a release since last April 1st? Or fixed the ugly case statement?

  case Variable: -- <====
    when 0      => Put_Line ("Zero");
    when 1 .. 9 => Put_Line ("Positive Digit");
    when 10 | 12 | 14 | 16 | 18 =>
      Put_Line ("Even Number between 10 and 18");
    when others => Put_Line ("Something else");
  } -- <====

Matching : with } does not make for clearer code.

[exitcode0]

What other suggestions do you have besides changes to the case statements?

[Jtsummers]

Ada++ makes two changes to the Ada language. First, it changes some keywords into new keywords or symbols, but in a gross way (the case example, is becomes : as a blanket rule, even when it leads to : being paired with }). This could be done by a (tedious) awk program or sed script. The second change it makes is that use will also with a package, that's a nice ergonomic feature. But it's the only thing of modest complexity that it does to change the language. There are no other enhancements to the language that it introduces that make it a compelling thing or an obvious non-joke (it's release date for 0.2.0 was 1 April 2021).

The actual Ada developers are focused on actual language enhancements with the Ada 2022 standard and increasing the scope of properties that SPARK (a proper subset of Ada now) can prove about a program. Including approaching some of the properties that people find desirable with Rust's borrow checker and lifetime analysis. Ada++ should be doing things like that, meaningfully improving the language and not just being a glorified awk program that doesn't change or add any real syntactic or semantic properties of the language. Also, the author should stop doing releases on April Fool's Day if they really want to be taken seriously.

[lolinder]

It is an April Fools Day joke. They forked GCC and made one commit on April Fools Day 2021, and haven't touched it sense.

Compare:

Ada++ -- https://github.com/AdaPlusPlus/gcc/commits/master

GCC 10 (history from April 2021) -- https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/commits/releases/gcc-10?af...

[Jtsummers]

While I agree, the person I initially responded to has, in the past, asserted that they made it and that it is not a joke. They've remained committed to it for a couple years now and have, at times, misled or attempted to mislead people into thinking it was a serious effort. So when I catch them trying to do it again, I call them out.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29081047

It seems that they are either ludicrously committed to the joke, or have convinced themselves that it's a serious effort despite all evidence to the contrary.

[Lucretia9]

The joke was on AdaCore's website.