[uticus]

"Conclusions... Concerning low level programming, C is superior to Ada for its flexibility and for handling pointers or strings"

[musicale]

;-) Ada's advantages such as memory safety, concurrency model, range types, exception handling, pre/postconditions and invariants, etc. seem even more valuable now compared to C. Ada's memory-safe string handling seems like a very good idea vs. C.

Ada Minix sounds like it was an interesting exercise - I'd like to see more OS kernels written in memory safe languages.

[thesuperbigfrog]

True in 1993.

[modshatereality]

cracks open the "REFERENCE MANUAL FOR THE Ada(r) PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE"

looks like Ada83 specification has address clause though, which can effectively be used as a pointer when combined with System.Address / 'Address attribute. Also has access type, but you can't pass access type around all willy-nilly-like without unchecked_access (added in 95?).

C pointers are more flexible though, that much is true.

edit, almost forgot: the main downside of Ada < 95 is you don't get function pointers, or import/export pragma

[vba616]

I don't remember much of Ada, but here's something very basic I liked (had to look the details up):

You could declare custom integer types like this:

type My_Type is range -5 .. 10;

And then you could reference the range with My_Type'First or My_Type'Last

And there were named parameters.

   for A in Range_Type loop
      I_IO.Put (
         Item  => A,
         Width => 3,
         Base  => 10);
      ...
   end loop;

[cb321]

Nim [1] is like Ada in these ways but less verbose:

    import strutils # Or from strutils import repeat Or etc.
    type Foo = -5 .. 10                # Or range[-5 .. 10]
    echo Foo.low, " ", Foo.high        # range limits
    echo repeat(s = "x", n = Foo.high) # named params
    # var f: Foo = 15   # Will not compile

[1] https://nim-lang.org/