Is there any chance you'd expand on that? I'm curious to know your thoughts.
I’ve heard this exact argument about VHDL versus Verilog, with the former being explicitly based on Ada’s syntax and the latter being explicitly based on C’s. (Turns out though that VHDL is also strictly better than at least traditional Verilog, as it requires separate interface specifications which lead to improved modularity.)
If anyone were to actually try to create “Ada: The Next Generation” I’d encourage you to just go all the way to S-expressions. Focus on the completeness and correctness of _the system_ and stop worrying about superficial complaints—or brush them off with a suggestion that they can use any syntax they want and just translate it to the standard one via tree-walking.
I think of it a bit like rat's nest wiring vs. nice neat labelled cable looms.
I'll use this chance to say that I'm a fan of Ada's declarative blocks, which you could say are part of its syntax. There's a lot to like about Ada, and I'd encourage anyone interested in bare-metal programming to give it a try. Even if you don't intend to use it long-term, there's a lot of good language design ideas in Ada that can be learned from.
To address a sibling comment alleging that I'd rather it look like C, that's not necessarily true. I know this is much more controversial, but I'm actually more of a fan of Python's syntax.
I always felt that repeating myself to the compiler (down to `procedure subprogram is begin`…`end subprogram`) or otherwise being verbose was something of a feature in the vein of defense in depth than the syntax not aging well. It never seemed to me like it was meant to impose clarity on the code, just that you were meant to file your subprograms and types in triplicate. It's useful as a backstop against trying to do things quickly instead of doing them deliberately.
At least, Ada's use of verbosity stands in stark contrast to COBOL, which does have the explicit aim to make things clear.
I'm mostly of the same mind as you in re Python's (and Haskell's and F#'s) whitespace-oriented ways of doing things, at least until the real world creeps in. I've had problems with early block termination because of mixed tabs and spaces that weren't readily apparent, and the language's toolchain wasn't particularly helpful in diagnosing them, leading me to lean on external tools. (COBOL at least has the heritage of being column-oriented, so indentation being significant is less problematic there.)
