If you assume that Ada was designed by dolts who didn't care about things like memory mapped arrays, or efficiency, then you will spend your time fighting the Ada compiler, trying to do things in your old ways. If you assume instead that Ada was designed by bright people for use in embedded systems where access to the hardware, and efficiency, are common requirements, and that millions of lines of such applications are running quite successfully, then you should ask yourself how you, too, can benefit from using Ada features to attack your problems.
tmoran@acm.org comp.lang.ada Ada is getting more popular! Thu, 14 Oct 2010

www.adaic.com/whyada/index.html
In a nutshell:

• you write fewer bugs.
• the few bugs you do write are easier to find.
• in your programs, you can say what you mean.
• Ada attracts better programmers.

My experience shows that:

• people who learn Ada become more adept at other languages. This is because Ada teaches them to think properly. This in turn is because, in Ada, concepts are much more orthogonal than in other languages (e.g. encapsulation is orthogonal to types).
• people who spend the effort to learn Ada show they are real software engineers. Real software engineers base their decisions on technical merits, not popularity.
• Sloppy programmers avoid Ada, therefore Ada helps avoid sloppy programmers.

Prenez le temps de découvrir SPARK, ça n’est pas si compliqué qu’il n’y paraît et ça n’est même si limité que vous pourriez le craindre.
[snip: Un exemple Live et grandeur nature d’une application Ada/SPARK]
Le tout, dans une syntaxe lisible et directement compréhensible pour les habitué(e)s d’Ada.
Et Ça n’est pas un gadget, ça n’est pas pour annoter dans le vide, puisque cela pourra être contrôlé et validé. Ça vaut bien 10_000 fois tous les commentaires plus ou moins formalisés que l’on peut inventer dans son coin, non ?
N’écrivez plus vos commentaires formalisés (qui ne peuvent même pas être validés) à votre sauce : utilisez SPARK.
Suggestion : après avoir fait quelque tours de manège avec Examiner, passer donc rendre visite au Checker, vous n’allez pas être déçu(e) ; vous allez avoir une belle surprise en découvrant ce qu’est ce Checker ;)

yannick_duchene 14 May 2010 fr.comp.lang.ada

Q:
pourquoi les entreprises ne font pas le choix de ce langage Ada, puisqu'il est plus adapté à l'ingénierie logicielle (fiabilité, maintenance...)?

A:
Parce que ces entreprises ne font pas d'ingéniérie logicielle. Pour éviter de trop réfléchir, elles utilisent ce que j'appelle l'argument du lemming.
"Tout le monde" utilise Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Microsoft Word et Microsoft Excel, donc je fais pareil et tant pis pour les virus, bugs, plantages, normes propriétaires, coûts de license, coûts de la traçabilité des licenses et mises à jour forcées.
"Tout le monde" programme en *, donc je programme en * et tant pis pour les dépassements de tampon, bugs, failles de sécurité, coûts de maintenance (de toutes façons la maintenance sera le problème de mon successeur). Commes les autres lemmings font pareil, personne ne remarquera jamais ma médiocrité. Je pourrai réutiliser leurs "composants logiciels" et leurs "bibliothèques" les yeux fermés. Et encore plus beau: je pourrai embaucher autant de programmeurs interchangeables, voire jetables, que je veux puisqu'ils connaissent tous le langage *. (Corollaire: la connaissance approfondie du langage * est un prérequis absolument indispensable pour une embauche contrairement à la connaissance des systèmes de contrôle de versions, des bases de données de bugs, des méthodes de test automatique, du travail en équipe, des algorithmes, etc).
02 May 2010 22:07:10 Ludovic Brenta fr.comp.lang.ada

Q: what is the relation of root_integer , universal_integer and Integer ?

A:
Root_Integer is an (anonymous!) type that includes all values acceptable by the implementation; i.e. its range is System.Min_Int..System.Max_Int.

Conceptually, all integer types are derived from Root_Integer; i.e. if you write:
type Age is range 0..125;
it becomes for the compiler:
type Age is new Root_Integer range 0..125;
(LRM 3.5.4 (14))
Universal_Integer is more like the set of the mathematical integers; it is the type of integer literals, but any use of one of its values gets immediately converted to the expected type (this a slightly simplified model). (LRM 3.4.1 (6/2)
Integer is just a predefined integer type, defined in package standard, with no special property. It is used to index strings, but safe for that, many projects forbid its use because it is not portable. Abuse of type Integer is generally an indication that the programmer has not been educated in defining proper types!
A last word: a casual programmer does not need to care about root_integer and universal_integer. Leave that to lawyers!

by J-P. Rosen www.adalog.fr in comp.lang.ada 23 Apr 2010

Ada and SPARK are languages that are both more expressive and less permissive than C and Java, which greatly facilitates analysis.
Embedded Systems Design (ESD) Apr 2010 pp.25-30: Expressive vs. permissive languages: Is that the question?

Obviously Fortran persists because of existing code base and those that only "know" that. But egads, the current rendition of Fortran seem to have so many "bags on the side" and is downright "butt ugly". Why anyone would want to continue to wallow in that swill, is beyond me. Ada as a language OTOH, is so nice and clean by comparison.
6 Apr 2010 Warren Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.fortran Subject: Re: Why is Ada considered "too specialized" for scientific use

I decided to create the first ever RISC OS WIMP application written in Ada.
I still think this was one of my best decisions ever - in the light of extremely limited free time to do development, you really need a compiler and a language to detect most errors without testing.

found in Steffen Huber's site by 20100318ph

...or worthless - the whole idea of a module (package in Ada) spec is to document what the caller needs to know and "hide" what the caller doesn't need to know.
why should I be forced to read another document just to understand a module's interface.
typical C and C++ programmers don't seem to "get" this concept.

From: Marco in comp.lang.ada Sat, 6 Mar 2010

Ada has strong accuracy requirements on the implementation of Generic_Elementary_Functions, while other languages have little to say.
This is a major difference between Ada and most other programming languages: Ada defines error bounds for all numeric operations, so that it's possible to perform useful numeric analysis on an Ada program without knowing anything at all about the target hardware.
There is of course a cost to that capability.
But it is an important capability which rarely is taken advantage of : as noted in a previous thread, without numerical analysis, you have no idea whether the results you are getting has any significance or not. And "not" is far more likely than people like to admit. Randy.
From: Randy Brukardt randy_rrsoftware.com comp.lang.ada 15 Feb 2010

Man hat nie genug Zeit, etwas richtig zu machen, jedoch immer genug Zeit, etwas nochmal zu machen.
Jan Pfaff 07 Oct 2009 ifb.uni-stuttgart

Real men only program in two languages and they both begin with A: Assembler and Ada.
Why don't you see more non-military systems developed in those languages?
Cause there aren't enough real men out there to go around.
WJT Sr. Sw Eng commented on Aug 13, 2009 6:49:23 PM :
Real men program in C By Michael Barr Embedded.com (08/01/09, 12:00:00 AM EDT)

Java is probably thought to be closer to business; at least I've heard teachers say so. It is, in another sense, at least: sloppy base type systems and hand made concurrency are a good basis for continued support business. While Java's int, long, etc. only require a little hubris to handle them properly, there are the ubiquituous features of the same spirit, equally successful: int, long, etc. in C and their integer overflows and buffer overflows.
These will provide for vulnerability protection opportunities and help establish international software companies :-)
Java has learned from this base type system, so it moved the imperfections to object spaghetti. No?

You should be teaching what everyone wants.
You should be teaching what everyone teaches.
You should be rushing towards a new paradigm in teaching as soon as it is there.
Be part of the crowd. It's only tax payers' money.
14 Jul 2009 Georg Bauhaus futureapps.de comp.lang.ada

It's interesting that the primary reason that we didn't change type Integer from 16-bit to 32-bit when we moved the compiler to the 386 was because we had (and our customers had) too much old code that failed to follow the advice to avoid using the predefined types. And a lot of that code assumed a 16-bit representation.
Moral of the story: if you care about portability, limit as much as possible the use of the numeric types defined in Standard.
Randy. randy@rrsoftware.com Wed Jul 1 16:29:20 2009 comp.lang.ada Re: unsigned type

Adam: Ummm... only half right. If Natural'First is implementation-defined, you're working with a rather bizarre implementation.
Rod: Doh! I'll go straight to the back of the class then... :-)
Jun 19,2009 comp.lang.ada

En attendant, "l'unique type Integer" est une formulation curieuse s'agissant d'Ada: Ada permet justement de définir ses types entiers sur mesure, au point que l'on déconseille même l'utilisation d'Integer...
J-P. Rosen www.adalog.fr 28 May 2009 fr.sci.maths,fr.comp.lang.ada

AdaCore has no obligation to provide free GNAT releases, but they chose to do so as a community service[1].
[1] And because it can only increase the number of Ada programmers, which is good for them.
Samuel Tardieu 30 Apr 2009 comp.lang.ada

Ada works best when it's used the way it was intended, and that's sometimes different from the low-level approaches required in other languages.

Jeff Carter 14 Jan 2009 comp.lang.ada

I know of one really good C programmer who is now an Ada programmer. His reasons for switching to Ada are largely the same reasons that made him really good in the first place. And... he's lucky enough to be working in a job where he can choose the programming language he wants to use.

Peter C. Chapin, 06 Dec 2008, Newsgroup comp.lang.ada

After years of C programming and trying other languages (like C++, Java, Haskell, Python),
I had started to learn Ada early in 2007.
This powerful and beautiful language has become my favourite,
and I decided to do the code development as a programming exercise in Ada.

found in Software for Codebreaking of the Lorenz SZ42 by Joachim Schueth 20071116

Ada--The programming language that promised to deliver very high-quality code at a reasonable price.
In practice it was found to fulfill those promises, though at the cost of annoying programmers by making them stick to a very strict syntax.
So it was all but abandoned in favor of inferior alternatives. After all, debugging is sort of fun!

(If a project's final phase is called debugging, do we call the initial parts bugging?)

By Jack Ganssle, Embedded Systems Design,June2007page53,(20070530, 11:21:00 AM EDT)
www.embedded.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=199703463

Ada is clearly a better language:
I routinely get a factor of 2-4
in productivity improvement in Ada vs C++.

stephe-leake.org Fri May 4 2007 comp.lang.ada

When I was first learning Ada, back around 1986 or so,
I was astonished at the percentage of programs I wrote
which, once I had a clean compile, did _exactly_ what I expected.
It's borne out as well in the form those "stump the experts" sessions take.
With C type languages, the question is: "What does this do?"
With Ada, the question is: "Will this compile?"
Bob Spooner rls19 psu.edu 16 Apr 2007 comp.lang.ada

..."man" page for atan2 has some information.
It's not as detailed as the Ada manual,
because after all this is C
and providing specific details would infringe on
the inalienable right of C programmers to shoot themselves in the foot.

Adam Beneschan 01 Mar 2007 comp.lang.ada Re: Ada 95 ARCTAN function

Moral: for memory corruption bugs: they can be anywhere, even in code that's
supposedly well-tested. And a likely culprit is bindings to non-Ada code,
because the checking that Ada provides is lost there
(the compiler can't detect mistakes).

Randy Brukardt 01 Dec 2006 comp.lang.ada Re: Possible heap problem on Windows, help sought

"Possibly one of the most telling stats is that we find loads more
bugs in the C code than the Ada code. I can think of 1 bug that
PolySpace uncovered in Ada code in all that time. It arguable that
we'd have been a lot cheaper to not bother with C or PolySpace and
just write everything in Ada!!"

Jack Ganssle The Embedded Muse 137 Copyright 2006 TGG November 21, 2006

Peut etre qu'un jour, face a des megatonnes de lignes inmaintenables en C++ ou java, on se mettra a reflechir et...
Ada deviendra un langage a la mode :)

Courage !

Stephane Riviere 05 May 2005 Oleron Island - France stephane.rochebrune.org

Robert Dewar, Apr 21, 2005, GNAT Academic Program discussion list, GAP gnat.info

Frank Piron 2005-04-05

This built-in-quick'n'dirty unreliability is obviously a Bad Thing with commercial aircraft avionics, but a huge cash cow otherwise, as the customer has no choice but to pay through the nose after delivery to correct fatal flaws.
Alan & Carmel Brain http://aebrain.blogspot.com 21 Mar 2005

This looks like the cue for my favourite quote. It was told to me by the man who taught me to fly.
"The superior pilot uses his superior judgement to avoid those situations that would otherwise require his superior skill"
Although it is about flying, it is also the reason I use Ada (and particularly SPARK) --- so that I don't have constantly to flaunt my superior skill :-) Peter Amey Fri Mar 11 2005

Sloppy programmers will avoid Ada like the plague, because they resent discipline in general and don't appreciate being taught lessons. A good software engineer will be attracted to Ada because she is a powerful ally.
Ludovic Brenta Sat, 05 Mar 2005 20:46:45

Ada.
                                                Marius Amado Alves 20050303

rambam@bigpond.net.au Mar2,2005: Easy ! Just publish 'Explosives For Dummies' and leave out the safety instructions. That will improve the human gene pool. :-)