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From: pattis@cs.washington.edu (Richard Pattis)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Free/Cheap Ada compilers
Summary: From comp.lang.misc
Message-ID: <15585@june.cs.washington.edu>
Date: 28 Mar 91 18:06:49 GMT
Reply-To: pattis@june.cs.washington.edu (Richard Pattis)
Organization: University of Washington, Computer Science, Seattle
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

The following is an excerpt from a comp.lang.misc post by Barry Shein (in
which he analyzes C, FORTRAN, Pascal, Ada, Scheme, and C++ for use in
teaching).  Whether this post is accurate or not, I think it clearly states
common perceptions about Ada.

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4. ADA - Few compilers, mostly too expensive for academics to ever
own, few books oriented towards CS, very demanding on the computing
resources (usually precipitating battles between the people who teach
and those who run the computers as the intro class makes the system
unusable), oh well.

DOD et al blew it with ADA by not making ADA environments available
(thru grants etc) to educators. Right now it's mostly non-existent in
academia, and the few faculty I know who insisted on teaching with ADA
had to be heroes with raising money to support their courses.

So its suitability as a teaching language is mostly moot, you don't
own it, and you can't afford it.

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Rich