Re: Looking for survey results

[afd@k.cc.purdue.edu.UUCP]

I conducted the survey you were referring to, it was a rehash of Larry
Mazlack's ongoing Academic Modula-2 survey.  Unfortunately, I lost the
account the survey was being conducted on about two weeks after I
originally posted it.  There were only two distinct responses: one for a 
course which was only being temporarily offered and didn't expect to be 
repeated, and one for a software engineering with Ada course being offered 
at Stanford University.  I apologize for the mess, the accounts I have now 
are on machines that have only limited access to the networks (this may have
already changed, but at the time of the survey little could get through).


In response to your article about introducing object-oriented languages,
the following summarizes my experiences in trying to get Ada accepted
at Purdue:

Purdue uses Pascal for its lower division cs courses, and 'C' for most of
its upper-division/graduate level courses.  I managed to get Powell's
Modula-2 compiler into an unsupported directory available to class accounts,
and have used it in several courses.  However, last semester I enrolled in
Purdue's Software Engineering course and tried to get an Ada environment
established there.  I thought a medium-level language like 'C' was unsuitable 
for such a course, which required a large project to be developed by groups
of students.

I was given several reasons why such an environment was infeasible:
a lack of interest, the compiler would require too much time on the Vaxen,  
the unavailibility of a validated Ada compiler for the IBM, and so on.  A
debate started on a local newsgroup, where some of the unix systems
programmers belittled Ada as a throwback to PL/1, and generally inferior to
'C'.  To my knowledge, there is no Ada compiler or environment now at Purdue,
a situation that I hope will soon change.  My Software Engineering group
programmed in Modula-2 and 'C', interfacing the two without much trouble,
but I've been told that if disc space runs short, the Modula-2 compiler goes.

                                      Bob Hathaway
                                      afd@k.cc.purdue.edu