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Comment by matthewjheaney | Hacker News Reader

Oh please, the comparison of Ada to COBOL is invidious. Ada simply requires you to be explicit about your intent. This is a feature, not a flaw. You mean to say that you've never been burned by an implicit conversion in C, or a misplaced semi-colon? Ada is no less verbose than Java.

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I think grandparent refers to what appears to be gratuitous verbosity, i.e.

    procedure Foo is
    begin
    ...
    end Foo;

vs java

    void foo() {
    ...
    }

Even if one wanted to be explicit about indicating what "End" refers too this could have been

   proc Foo
   ...
   end Foo

EDIT: when I write "appears" I mean "there may be a perfectly good reason for it but isn't obvious", not that it is in fact gratuitous.

Variable and type declarations happen between the procedure foo and the begin.

I am an Ada developer, but I think it is objective to say that anyone who opposes a language because there fingers will have extra work probably doesn't belong in this field. If you consider the development process as a whole—research, planning, development, verification, etc.—those extra keystrokes add an exceptionally marginal amount of time to the development process, but reduce time so much more by making the code more intuitive to read. Don't let me lead you to believe that Ada's words make it intuitive; that would be disingenuous, but the syntax has been formed since its inception to be readable by developers and non-developers alike. This is an important distinction with something like Java, neverminding that you don't have to explicitly instantiate generics in Java. One of the key objectives of Ada is code that is especially intuitive to non-developers. There's a lot going on in the language. I hope this helps.

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