Does rust have any influence from Ada?

1

It says so on Wikipedia but citation is dubious. :relaxed:

2

I wouldn't say it's taken much influence from Ada. It has similar goals, of being a powerful, safe, systems programming language, so Ada has obviously been brought up several times in design discussions, but I don't think that the influence is all that strong, any more than the influence from other languages which may have been brought up occasionally in design discussions like Python or Pascal. It looks like many of the discussions have been around range-limited numeric types and integer overflow, and Rust has not implemented any kind of range limited integer types and only does integer overflow checks in debug mode, so the influence isn't all that strong there.

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3

But they will be a good thing to add! :slight_smile:

4

I think Rust is compared to Ada often because it is attempting to operate in a similar space (safe, correct systems programming), but that Ada didn't have any particular influence on its design. It seems fair to say that the biggest influences on Rust were C/C++, ML, and "early 2000s programming language research" with an emphasis on the Cyclone papers.

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5

It would be nice if Rust had more Ada/Pascal influences. Ada is much more readable programming language, the source code usually reads as plain english text, but reading some Rust code makes my eyes and brain hurt.