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   chsh -s /usr/bin/pwsh $USER (a13cui@emacs.ch)'s status on Sunday, 23-Jul-2023 15:45:35 JST chsh -s /usr/bin/pwsh $USER

   I am genuinely arguing that we should use #pascal and #ada more.

   C was made for assembly cosplaying as a high level language (even then, Forth is doing a better job in that aspect...). Pascal is ALGOL-68 done right so it traces its heritage back to a committee of brilliant computer scientists and Ada was made for the DoD.

   Pascal figured out before C (it precedes it by 2 years) strings (yes, actual strings, not just char arrays), a well structured and strict syntax, native set operators (you can check whether an element is in a set, include, exclude elements, compare them, even intersection and union are supported!), strong type safety (some claim it's too much, but then you have Rust, so...), even OOP nowadays.

   As for Ada, you have in depth defense by default (as in no implicit conversions (just like Pascal), it treats what would be equivalent types using `typedef` in C as totally different and gives you an error (good job Rust, you at least figured that one out...)). You also get plenty of compile-time checks and run-time checks, as well as an access-type model rather than providing low-level generic pointers (each access type is handled by a storage pool, either the default one or a custom one to allow more exotic system memory implementations like NUMA and thus you never access heap memory directly, but you have to use this storage pool manager (similar to how Zig does everything through allocators). You also don't have to worry about deciding how exactly data is passed in or out of a function/procedure call (you specify the direction of each parameter, but the ultimate decision of whether the data being passed via a register, via the heap, or as a reference will be taken by the compiler or runtime, never by the programmer). It's also the first internationally standardized OOP language with Ada 83.

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     chsh -s /usr/bin/pwsh $USER (a13cui@emacs.ch)'s status on Sunday, 23-Jul-2023 15:45:38 JST chsh -s /usr/bin/pwsh $USER

     in reply to

     To add to #ada 's praises, it has built-in support for concurrency and distribution (with tasks, protected objects (protected types are composite types whose components are protected from concurrent access by multiple tasks) and partitions (a program/part of a program that can be invoked from outside the Ada implementation, they can run on separate processors and contain their own run-time systems)).

     Ada also has low-level representation clauses (for people who've had to deal with packets of a specific format, you know how painful it is to do bitfields in C, while in Ada you can just name the fields and it will Just Work, valuable when interfacing to physical devices or communicating across networks). It's just wonderful for those who need absolute control in the low-level space.

     Unlike C implementations generally, Ada has a comprehensive validation suite and has gone through the ANSI and ISO standardization processes. Ada compiler vendors have corresponding validation suites (ACVC and ACATS) and may submit their products for independent validation of conformance to the standard).

     Ada's predefined environment includes pragmas named Export, Import and Convention and services that help to import legacy code in C, C++, Fortran, COBOL and assembly, and to export Ada routines and libraries written in those languages (so yes, you can reasonably have type-safe COBOL wrappers that Just Work).

     Finally, *a lot* of industries depend on it: the avionics, defense, space, air‑traffic control, rail, automotive, security, and medical industries all depend on the language. It would be a security nightmare if you had medical equipment written in C... The European Space Agency (ESA) has been using Ada for a long time, even NASA is using it. In 2019 NVIDIA trusted Ada and SPARK (a provable subset of Ada) to assure safety of their self-driving cars: (https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2019/02/05/adacore-secure-autonomous-driving/).

     If you want Rust-like memory safety and a trusted language for critical devices, Ada might be for you. :)

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