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Comment by synack | Hacker News Reader

One of the "Steelman" requirements that Ada was built to satisfy was that any program should be able to be represented with a subset of ASCII that would be compatible with the largest range of terminals, teletypes, and punched cards as possible. Less relevant today, but that's why Ada has so many keywords in it's syntax.

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Just found this:

https://blog.adacore.com/a-modern-syntax-for-ada

That was an April Fools' joke.

Seriously, the curly braces are a huge improvement. That's no joke.

The "fn" and ":" are good too.

I'm less sure about "include", because I doubt Ada does textual inclusion. If it does, then that is good too. Otherwise, better choices might be: using, use, require, requires, depend, depends, external, library, unit, module...

I don't get this whole need to shorten keywords to 2 letters when the IDE will just autocomplete them, it's really stupid.

Not everyone wants to write code in an IDE. Quite a lot of people prefer a text editor of some kind.

VSCode / Atom aren't IDE's, they are editors with lots of plugin's, like VIM and Emacs are.

The wonderful programming experience of UNIX V6.

ed?

I can't stand that autocomplete. It gets in the way of actual typing. What if I want nothing in the list? What if I actually want to use the arrow keys immediately after that thing has decided to trigger?

It probably also cuts down on human ability, like never taking the training wheels off. In the long run productivity might be lower.

The point of using the end statements is to make sure the programmer knows which clause is being closed.

Ha, that's what I get for posting stuff without reading it.

Like all good jokes, there is a grain of truth in it.

You should count up how many keywords C++ has, then count the number in Ada.

Assuming I counted correctly,

Ada 2012 has 73 reserved words: http://www.ada-auth.org/standards/rm12_w_tc1/html/RM-2-9.htm...

C++ 20 has 97 keywords: https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/keyword

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