Re: Resources for teaching a child Ada ?

Re: Resources for teaching a child Ada ?

[Michal Nowak]

On 2002-12-24 at 15:56 faust wrote:

>My 12 year old wants to learn Ada 
>( He actually wanted to learn Java or Pascal but I convinced him that
>Ada is superior to both. )
>
>Could anyone recommend a suitable text ?
>(Preferably online. )

Well, I looked over tutorials, which that I downloaded since
I went into Ada. It may be hard to find something for kid
with no programming background at all. But kids are smart,
and get the knowledge fast. As I remember I was starting 
having only help files from Borland's Turbo Pascal compiler
at age about 13 years old. You (your child) may look at 
"Ada 95 problem solving and Program Design" by M.B. Feldman
and E.B.Koffman. It is written with easy language style, 
without additional formal wording. The sample programs are 
short and well described. I don't know if it available 
somewhere available on-line, but it is distributed with
ObjectAda compiler from Aonix. Free, special edition is
available for download at http://www.aonix.com/
As an additional book you may look at "Ada 95: The Craft of
Object-Oriented Programming" by John English, although
I think it is a bit more difficult than Feldman's. It
is available at http://www.it.bton.ac.uk/staff/je/adacraft/

Good luck and happy Ada programming,
   - Michal


-- -----------------------------------------------------------------
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--  / _ \  ' * | |    *   *      *                           ~*~
-- | |_| |  ___| | * _____    `      *  `  *       *    `   i/:\i
-- |  _ *| | __  |  | __' |   *                            i/`:'\i
-- |_| |_| |____*|_ |_____|_  Christmas with Ada:  `      i/`':`'\i
--   *      '       http://www.autopen.com/OTANBAUM.shtml '^^^I^^^'
-- -----------------------------------------------------------------

Re: Resources for teaching a child Ada ?

[David Wright]

"Michal Nowak" <vinnie@inetia.pl> wrote in message
news:mailman.1040770322.23621.comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org...
> On 2002-12-24 at 15:56 faust wrote:
>
 You (your child) may look at
> "Ada 95 problem solving and Program Design" by M.B. Feldman
> and E.B.Koffman. It is written with easy language style,
> without additional formal wording. The sample programs are
> short and well described. I don't know if it available
> somewhere available on-line, but it is distributed with
> ObjectAda compiler from Aonix. Free, special edition is
> available for download at http://www.aonix.com/

Hi Michal,

It's Christmas day here in Australia and this looks like a very welcome
present. Just to be clear, before I download 75MGs of data. Is the F & K
text distributed in .pdf format and among the files downloaded with the zip?
Or does it constitute the on line help within the IDE itself (i.e.,
hypertext format)?

Many thanks for this tip.

Merry Christmas to all
David Wright

Resources for teaching a child Ada ?

[faust]

My 12 year old wants to learn Ada 
( He actually wanted to learn Java or Pascal but I convinced him that
Ada is superior to both. )

Could anyone recommend a suitable text ?
(Preferably online. )


--------------------------------------------------------
Come see,
real flowers
of this pain-filled world.

(from Basho)

Re: Resources for teaching a child Ada ?

[chris.danx]

faust wrote:

> My 12 year old wants to learn Ada 
> ( He actually wanted to learn Java or Pascal but I convinced him that
> Ada is superior to both. 

I'm saying nothing about Pascal (haven't used a modern variant, still 
like TP though), but will say that Java is as good as Ada depending on 
what you want to do.  For some things Ada sucks, for some things Java 
sucks.  They're not superiour to one another just better at one thing 
which the other isn't.  I would agree that Ada is (IMO) a better 
teaching language *in this context*, because you don't have to get into 
OO early, (java) packages, shallow copying, or stuff like that.  Just my 
opinion (no flame war please).

I often think language superiority is 90% personal preference, 9% 
problem domain, 1% technical.


> Could anyone recommend a suitable text ?
> (Preferably online. )

No text (though John English's online text is very good - see Adapower 
for a link), but something to make it more interesting.  Jewl or 
AdaGraph*!  The thing that kept my interest when I was learning to 
program (around the same age) was graphics and stuff like that.  Text 
input interested me for all of five minutes, then I wanted to do 
something fun and playing with the graphics windows in Metacomco Basic 
(Atari ST) was it.  After a month of Basic I got a pc with turbo pascal 
and the first thing I did was explore graph.tpu and do mad stuff with 
circles, lines, squares and what not.  Make graphs of inputs and things 
like that.

The tutors at Uni knew that people liked graphics, gui stuff and 
exploited it to make it fun.  People hated the text io stuff but the 
graphics stuff they did held their interest.  We had a number of 
problems to solve which people liked.

One was to navigate a map with square cells and walls to get to the 
exit, another to land a rocket on a pad from a (fixed) launch position - 
in fact there was a crate of beer for the one who landed it in the 
shortest time; probably not a suitable reward for a twelve year old :) - 
and the other was planets orbiting the sun (just the earth, then with 
the earth and moon, then the same with darksides on the earth and moon - 
the darkside of the moon was tricky).



Merry Christmas,
Chris


p.s. AdaGraph -> Jewl might be a good progression.  Adagraph is just 
drawing in a window, but Jewl is a (simple) GUI toolkit.  Once your son 
had some experience with Ada he might want to explore GUIs and Jewl 
would be good for that, it's very easy to work with and doesn't bog you 
down with some of the concepts of bigger GUI kits (which is a task in 
itself).


*if it's Linux/Unix you'd need to write your own or write a wrapper 
round some GtkAda stuff to make it simple enough for a beginner to get 
to grips with.


-- 
for personal replies change spamoff to chris

Re: Resources for teaching a child Ada ?

[David Starner]

On Wed, 25 Dec 2002 00:36:29 +0000, "chris.danx"
<spamoff.danx@ntlworld.com> wrote:

>The tutors at Uni knew that people liked graphics, gui stuff and 
>exploited it to make it fun.  People hated the text io stuff but the 
>graphics stuff they did held their interest.  We had a number of 
>problems to solve which people liked.

I think that's person specific. I hate doing I/O in all forms; I wish
all programs were filters, taking input in and dumping output out (as
a programmer, of course - interactive programs are nice for using.)
Most of my early programming was writing exploratory math programs.

Re: Resources for teaching a child Ada ?

[Michal Nowak]

On 2002-12-25 at 09:48 David Wright wrote:

>Hi Michal,

Hello David,

>It's Christmas day here in Australia and this looks like a very welcome
>present. 

It's also Christmas time on the opposite part of the world :-). 
I'm happy I was helpful to you.

>Just to be clear, before I download 75MGs of data. Is the F & K
>text distributed in .pdf format and among the files downloaded with the
>zip?
>Or does it constitute the on line help within the IDE itself (i.e.,
>hypertext format)?

I'm sorry to say, bad rather bad news time time. The book is available
only after installation of the compiler and it is in HTML format.
I suppose, that to be OK with the law, you have to at least download
and install the Aonix compiler to use HTML edition. Another solution
is to purchase a printed version, but that may be not a best one, since
you do not know what's inside and whether it will be suitable.
Here is a homepage of Michael Feldman:
http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~mfeldman/
there are some links at the bottom which may be of interest to you,
particularly:
http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~mfeldman/cs1book/
and click there "Introducing Algorithms: Adventures of the Spider" 
to get a sample from the book.

Here
http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~csci190/spring01/190s01ada.html
you may find another tutorial by Michael Feldman. 

>Many thanks for this tip.

You're welcome.


Merry Christmas to everyone,
   - Michal


-- -----------------------------------------------------------------
-- * ___  *     _'  '   *    `        *   `     *      '      .
--  / _ \  ' * | |    *   *      *                           ~*~
-- | |_| |  ___| | * _____    `      *  `  *       *    `   i/:\i
-- |  _ *| | __  |  | __' |   *                            i/`:'\i
-- |_| |_| |____*|_ |_____|_  Christmas with Ada:  `      i/`':`'\i
--   *      '       http://www.autopen.com/OTANBAUM.shtml '^^^I^^^'
-- -----------------------------------------------------------------

Re: Resources for teaching a child Ada ?

[faust]

Actually, don't worry.
I have decided to teach him Scheme.

There is an excellent free windows GUI with graphical support that has
been designed for beginners called Dr Scheme. 

--------------------------------------------------------
Come see,
real flowers
of this pain-filled world.

(from Basho)

Re: Resources for teaching a child Ada ?

[Stefan Skoglund]

faust wrote:
> There is an excellent free windows GUI with graphical support that has
> been designed for beginners called Dr Scheme. 

Which is an excellent decision and also will
make it easier for the boy to learn Ada later on.

Try to make him use functional programmgin and he will be an happy
camper later on.

Re: Resources for teaching a child Ada ?

[Wes Groleau]

> what you want to do.  For some things Ada sucks, for some things Java 
> sucks.  They're not superiour to one another just better at one thing 
> which the other isn't.  I would agree that Ada is (IMO) a better 

Having just gotten a 97% in my first formal Java class,
I'd have to say that for the pedagogical assignments,
Ada would have been slightly better for most of them.

Java was better for the O-O features, but _only_ because
they were designed for Java's confusion between encapsulation
device and inheritance device.

More than once I noted that the assignment begged
for Ada's enumeration types, numeric derived types,
and/or subtypes.

Re: Resources for teaching a child Ada ?

[Warren W. Gay VE3WWG]

Wes Groleau wrote:
>> what you want to do.  For some things Ada sucks, for some things Java 
>> sucks.  They're not superiour to one another just better at one thing 
>> which the other isn't.  I would agree that Ada is (IMO) a better 
> 
> Having just gotten a 97% in my first formal Java class,
> I'd have to say that for the pedagogical assignments,
> Ada would have been slightly better for most of them.
> 
> Java was better for the O-O features, but _only_ because
> they were designed for Java's confusion between encapsulation
> device and inheritance device.
> 
> More than once I noted that the assignment begged
> for Ada's enumeration types, numeric derived types,
> and/or subtypes.

And how about the lack of dispatching
based upon return types?

-- 
Warren W. Gay VE3WWG
http://home.cogeco.ca/~ve3wwg

Re: Resources for teaching a child Ada ?

[Wes Groleau]

> And how about the lack of dispatching
> based upon return types?

That was not an issue in any of my assignments.