Re: Ada as the language of first exposure

[pattis@beaver.cs.washington.edu (Richard Pattis)]

Just two comments:

1) We've been teaching Ada to our 1st year students hear aw UW for 4 years; we
now teach 1,200/year. We teach Ada to these students as an improved,
standardized Pascal. Sure we don't teach some things (tasking is the most
obvious). But we do teach exceptions (they are in Pascal, just not
controllable), operator overloading (with complex numbers),  packages,
generics (sorting and queues are the most obvious examples), and the
protection afforded by private types.

Ada contains many simple features that improve on Pascal: no begin-end blocks
in control structures, short-circuit logical operators, better parameter modes,
unconstrained arrays, structured return types, etc. We have found it no
harder to teach than Pascal. Student programs are smaller and more general
because they use Ada.

2) The price problem is still there, but much reduced. With NYU's free AdaEd,
Alsys lowering prices to $500 for a bunch of machines, Meridian's sub $100
compiler for PCs, DEC's inclusion of Ada in their Academic Software Package,
the upcoming GNU Ada (GNAT) this complaint is not a show stopper.

Rich Pattis


-- 
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  Richard E. Pattis                     "Programming languages are like
  Department of Computer Science         pizzas - they come in only "too"
    and Engineering                      sizes: too big and too small."