Re: Ada for 1st year students

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On Sat, 11 Oct 2008 06:46:36 -0700 (PDT), amado.alves@gmail.com wrote:

> On 11 Out, 01:15, Jeffrey Creem <j...@thecreems.com> wrote:
>> Too OO is an interesting topic.
> 
> It is a fascinating topic :-)

I strongly disagree.
 
> I've ruled out Java immediatly when I saw that a nice imperative
> algorithm must start with

The opposite to "imperative" is "declarative." Typing is an independent
issue.

In my view students should be exposed to typing together with algorithms.

> package public class ... or whatever
> 
> ---nothing to do with the logic of the algorithm.

The logic of any algorithm, except for primitive state machines, has no
meaning without the types of things being computed. A good course should
show this first. After all, using predefined types is bad taste in Ada.

Generations of students become programmers incapable to understand
difference between real, floating-point and fixed-point numbers. Didn't
they start with "nice imperative algorithm," before learning what the
number is?

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de