Compromises on basic things continue. I want to create an array whose size is not known at compile time. I believe I can declare this with

Mem : Array (Natural range <>) of Integer range -1..Integer'Last;

But this errors there's no initialization. You can initialize an array to a fixed value with (Others => -1), but then it doesn't know the size. I wind up making a sub-procedure *just* because that is the only syntax I can find for initializing an array to a size. https://github.com/mcclure/aoc2024/blob/b46079ddcb5c45d52af5882e940a593050c7beb9/09-01-disk/src/puzzle.adb#L14

Small observations:

- Inner procedures and functions of a larger procedure and function can access the outer procedure's local variables. That's nice. I suspect this is hiding some sort of horrible restriction on recursion, but it's nice.

- The error messages, at least in "gnat" the open source Ada compiler, are NOT good. I think this is downstream from the language having lots of minor similar-but-distinct concepts instead of single powerful concepts. There's a lot of jargon and lots of edges

Something I don't know how you'll feel about: You know how in every programming language except Lua you index arrays from 0, and in Lua you index arrays from 1? In Ada, if I'm understanding this correctly, you choose whether your code indexes arrays from 0 or 1. *On an array by array basis*. You could mix 0- and 1-indexed arrays in the same code. You could have an array which contains 10 elements at indexes 10 through 19 inclusive, if you wanted. An array is a map with integer keys in a range

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