Re: FORTRAN bug(was Re: C++ vs. Ada -- Is Ada loosing?)

[enterpoop.mit.edu!bloom-picayune.mit.edu!mintaka.lcs.mit.edu!ogicse!uwm.e du!cs.utexas.edu!csc.ti.com!tilde.csc.ti.com!mksol!mccall@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (fred j mccall 575-3539)]

In <1992Dec15.024340.22575@seas.gwu.edu> mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman
) writes:

>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.

There are also a lot of places that are teaching C as a first
language.  That doesn't make it any less a mistake, in my opinion. 

>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.

Substitute C for Ada in the above sentence and it makes equally good
sense.  I still don't think it's a good idea.  

>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.

As is any language.  I don't consider this a particularly good
argument for using it in a beginning class.

>>
>>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.

Then they should make the switch.  One would hope you're planning on
them learning more than one language, anyway.

-- 
"Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to live
 in the real world."   -- Mary Shafer, NASA Ames Dryden
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Fred.McCall@dseg.ti.com - I don't speak for others and they don't speak for me.