[samatman]

Verbosity was genuinely expensive at the time. Two ways: until the mid-80s, 5 1/4" floppies held between 100 and 250kB depending on format, so a program which used up three times as many bytes (I think that's a good multiplier from C to Ada) is making a meaningful difference for transfer, backups, storage.

What's probably more important is that 80 columns was far and away the likely maximum for a screen, and 40 columns wasn't unheard of. The word PROCEDURE took up 11 to 22% of the column width! This wasn't a show-stopper, Pascal uses a similar syntax (both of them derived from Algol of course) and was pretty popular, but plenty of people complained about Pascal's verbosity as well, and Ada is definitely more verbose than even Pascal.

The lack of autocomplete (even things like snippets were relatively uncommon) didn't help, but mainly, verbosity imposed real costs which are mitigated or irrelevant now.