[elcapitan]

> Virtually nothing stops you from using Ada

What would you recommend for getting started with it? Looks like there's GNAT and then also GNAT Pro and then the whole SPARK subset, which one would be best for learning and toying around?

[kqr]

GNAT. Upgrade to gprbuild when you start to find gnatmake limiting.

SPARK is best considered a separate language. It gives up some of the things that make Ada great in exchange for other guarantees that I'm sure are useful in extreme cases, but not for playing around.

[thesuperbigfrog]

If you are playing with Ada, be sure to try out Alire, a 'Rust cargo'-style tool for Ada libraries:

https://alire.ada.dev/

One thing to be aware of is that GNAT is part of GCC:

https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/GNAT

AdaCore is the primary developer of GNAT, SPARK, and related tools:

https://blog.adacore.com/a-new-era-for-ada-spark-open-source...

There are other Ada compilers as well:

https://forum.ada-lang.io/t/updated-list-of-ada-compilers/10...

[elcapitan]

Oh man that style guide is triggering hard :D

> Use three spaces as the basic unit of indentation for nesting.

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Style_Guide/Source_Code_Pr...

[thesuperbigfrog]

gnatformat is a handy tool for formatting working Ada code:

https://github.com/AdaCore/gnatformat

I had forgotten about the three spaces for indentation. Yuck.