Re: Why ADA?

[mcsun!uknet!gdt!brispoly!am_barry@uunet.uu.net (AM Barry)]

In article <1992Mar24.160042.28619@nobeltech.se> leeu@nobeltech.se (Leif Euren)
 writes:
>In article <1992Mar21.235624.1@jaguar.uofs.edu> das11@jaguar.uofs.edu writes:
>>	why should i program in ada when there is c?  what does ada
>>	offer me?
>
>You propably shouldn't write in Ada, as it has almost nothing to offer
>you.  The benefit is exclusively ours: we may be able to read what you
>have written, if you've done it in Ada.  And so may your project-partners.
>
>>	if i program with good oo style, what does ada buy me that i
>>	can not do in c?
>
>Ada is not an OOD-language; I'm positive that C++ is better for that
>field of programming.  Ada is at its best in large projects, and you
>don't see many of those as hand-in exercises in the universities.  But
>entering a univeristy, you should be prepared to study for life, not
>just for the exam.

In Bristol Poly we have been teaching Ada for many years. I was unsurprised
when, once initial prejudice was removed and students got used to the idea that
they had to actually 'say what they mean' in the language to find that the
majority of the students had a preference for Ada over C, C++, or Pascal. The
reason ? .... In large projects you can get a program up and running without
bugs quicker than C, it is more flexible and useful for teamwork than Pascal,
and it doesn't do unexpected things with memory (unlike C++). From a teaching
perspective, I can testify that Ada is a _lot_ easier to teach than either C or
Pascal even though it is a bigger language purely because there are so few
inconsistancies and the compiler is able to report intelligently on errors. Of
course, it is not my favourite language (too verbose), but when I actually want
to get something signifigant done, it has to be Ada.

By the way, concerning OO and Ada ... the 9X proposals for tagged types look
nice desite the lack of multiple inheritance, and are well fitted into the
current language features (derived types & the 'standard' way of representing
classes in Ada-83) ... which is more than can be said about the proposals
regarding Protected Records !!!!

Alwyn Barry, Senior Lecturer, Bristol Polytechnic.