Re: Ada as a beginning language

[cis.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!agate !stanford.edu!kronos.arc.nasa.gov!butch!rapnet!jcreem@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Jef frey M. Creem x5700)]

In article <1993Mar18.033431.12194@ariel.ec.usf.edu> dasmith@sunburn.ec.usf.edu
. (David Smith (GE)) writes:
>I am a Computer Science student at the University of South Florida in
>Tampa.  We now use Ada as the intro programming language for the program.
>
>I have been formally taught Pascal, C, adn Assembly and do most of my
>programming in Think Pascal, in which I am most comfortable.  From 
>what I have used Ada for (remember it IS and intro class) it seem very
>similar to Pascal other than the extremly tight type checking.
>
>I would like anyones option on Ada as the first/intro language for Computer
>Science.  My option is that the strong types, and other structures frustates
>new programers, as many of my classmates have been.  (and why is 0/=0.0?)

  It is probably better to be frustrated and have to take the time to
figure things out then to not be informed of serious flaws in one's view
of programming.  In the example 0 /= 0.0 apart from the types not
matching there is an issue about comparing (and expecting) floating
point numbers to be exactly equal to some integer value. For instance
if these were not contants but were something of the form
   if Some_Real_Type /= 0 then  ..   you are saying that if
Some_Real_Type = 1e-38 that it is still not good enough (ie still not
zero) in some cases this is what is intended but you have issues
such as .Should the compiler truncate the floating point number, round
it or do something else.

As far as the overall suitability of Ada as in introductory language
...In my opinion, its better than most other choices. It is difficult
to get away from the bad habits that even good C code teaches. I still
have problems with peole who have used Ada for a few years yearning to
pass system.addresses around in Ada code to get around having to learn
generics or becuase its more efficient :( 

There are other languages that have strong points for an introductory
language (Mod-2, even pascal) but there is little "wrong" with Ada for
an intro course (as a side note, no matter what language you use,    
beginners will be frustrated and sure that they have found a bug in
the compiler..At least with Ada they have a chance of being correct :)

Jeff Creem