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Date: 15 Dec 92 02:43:40 GMT
From: seas.gwu.edu!mfeldman@uunet.uu.net  (Michael Feldman)
Subject: Re: FORTRAN bug(was Re: C++ vs. Ada -- Is Ada loosing?)
Message-ID: <1992Dec15.024340.22575@seas.gwu.edu>
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

In article <1992Dec14.170421.18709@mksol.dseg.ti.com> mccall@mksol.dseg.ti.com 
(fred j mccall 575-3539) writes:
>
>I agree.  I feel the same way about Ada, by the way.  There's simply
>too much there to be teaching it to people as a first language.
Well, you're certainly entitled to your opinion. Those of us who are
actually _doing_ it, and (most of) our students, like what they see.

We don't tell the students what a verbose, hairy, big, risky dinosaur
Ada is, so they somehow get the impression they can learn it. And they do.

We teach our infant children a subset of English (or German, or whatever),
and we teach our freshmen a subset of Ada. They learn the rest as they
grow up. It's a language you can grow into.
>
>Pascal tends to be a somewhat more appropriate choice for a first
>language.  It's a nice protected environment with a limited set of
>features. 
The downside is that vanilla Pascal (the ISO standard version) is much
too underpowered for the software engineering stuff (like separate
compilation) we want to do, even with first-years. So many teachers go
with Turbo. Only trouble is, Philippe has decided that Turbo for Unix
isn't worth his trouble, so yanking the kids off their PC's onto the
Unix boxes in the lab is impossible unless they switch to C...or Ada.

Mike Feldman