I stumbled upon an in depth explanation of elaboration, it's standardized ordering scheme, and the options available to the programmer for controlling it in unsuccessful cases.

http://www.cs.uni.edu/~mccormic/4740/documentation/elaboration

First, it's still unclear why elaboration needs to be addressed by the programmer at all. I've never dealt with it in any other language such as C, Pascal or C++ where the order of allocation and assignment variables, as well as code execution, are rarely of concern. Why isn't it automatically handled and what benefits does it offer to the developer?

Second, elaboration failures are often not detected statically, but at runtime only as a "program error" exception. I find it a bit disconcerting, considering it can suddenly occur in a number of scenarios, including changes in the runtime, the code base, the compiler or its version. It seems to belie Ada's core tenet of code safety and reliability.