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by dharmatech 60 days ago
The ADA compiler for OpenVMS was over $200,000 in the 1990s.
1 comments

Probably because only defense contractors used it. Now imagine that kind of gouging occuring for everything else they spend money on.
Ada was designed to solve different problems in harsher environments than other PLs at the time. Mostly, it was designed for the defense and aeronautics industries and had to compete against other PL designs to become a govt standard, similar to how weapons of war are developed and chosen. Think developing for hardcore code audits. There is no way the language could check all the boxes and remain compatible with, say, Pascal or Modula syntax.