I retired from software engineering in 2014. Wrote at least 50KSLOC of Ada 83 and specified/designed even more. Did some Ada 95 before getting moved to a non-Ada shop. Thought I could go back to Ada for personal things, but a long thread about text problems tells me probably not. I’m also a “linguaphile” working with several European languages including Greek and Turkish, as well as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Thai. Everything I’ve done outside of work for decades has been UTF8. Apparently I will continue to use perl for tasks I can automate. Bummer—I really did like Ada.
Ada’s not bad for it, it’s just that there are some “batteries not included” (bad defaults) and “the experienced programmer will probably know what the problem is” (Unix-ism/mindset from GCC) from the confluence of the most common implementation (GNAT) and low level details.
Ada is perfect for dealing with Unicode and UTF-8.
It is nuclear powered.
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