[Lazamataz]

I like Ada. Pretty readable. But then again I cut my teeth on Cobol, Foxpro, and now C#, so I went progressively less-readable.

[OneWingedShark]

I like Ada. Pretty readable. But then again I cut my teeth on Cobol, Foxpro, and now C#, so I went progressively less-readable.

LOL - You'd think it'd be the other way.

I started on TPW 1.5 [i.e TP 7 w/ geared for Windows], moved to Delphi 5, then started college where we did C, Java/C++, upon graduation I did PHP and a little C# for employment — I picked up Ada doing hobby stuff at the end of college, after the Languages course introduced me and, well, I love the design concerns of readability and maintainability.

During the employment stint I did doing PHP I quickly came to miss a lot of Ada features:

1. Types - PHP made me learn to hate implicit conversion. "08" => (int) 0. Yep.
2. Subtypes - Seriously, why do most languages skip over value-restriction? W do it all the time in math (Given X, a positive integer…)
3. Packages - Why is there no grouping in PHP aside from the OOP bolt-on?
4. Generics - I hated having to track down cut-and-paste programming bugs.
5. Parameter Name-association - Because of $haystack/$needle vs $needle/$haystack parameter-order.
6. Calendar-package - the Date object is… unwieldy. (Because of the 'helpful' string-parsing it would do.)

I'm kinda interested in learning COBOL, not for general-programming but in case I get a job having to deal w/ reports. (IIUC COBOL is unmatched for such processing.)