From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.2 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID, REPLYTO_WITHOUT_TO_CC autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,33e793a459e66944 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: Aron Felix Gurski Subject: Re: What is Ada used for??? Date: 1996/10/09 Message-ID: <325BF6AD.1A11@sn.no>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 188842358 references: content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii organization: SN Internett mime-version: 1.0 reply-to: agurski@sn.no newsgroups: comp.lang.ada x-mailer: Mozilla 3.0 (Win16; I) Date: 1996-10-09T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Sean Roehnelt wrote: > > I'm taking my first programming class at school, and want to know where Ada > fits in to the grand scheme of things.... > > shouldn't I be learning c++ What makes you think that you should be learning C++? Just because it is the current "in" language? At this stage in your studies, you are *much* better off learning Ada 95 than one of the C/C++ dialects. Ada 95 (and other languages, like Modula-2, Modula-3 and Eiffel, by the way) are far better at teaching you the discipline that you will need to learn in order to become a *good* programmer. My own programs have all sorts of checks in them to make sure that none of the other programs running have corrupted my programs' data. Whenever I have found that a program *has* corrupted my programs, I have *invariably* found that it was a program with a C run-time library in it. (Both C and C++ programmers *still* haven't learnt to use pointers properly, and occasionally have uninitialized pointers that accidentally point into other programs' memory -- and then start writing there. This is not to say that it is not possible to write good software in C or C++; it just doesn't seem to happen all that often.) > isn't Ada old and outdated? In as much as the new Ada 95 standard became a standard in 1995, I wouldn't exactly call it "old and outdated". > > I don't know, and my instructor hasn't been able to clearify this for me at > all. > > thanks, > sean >From someone who graduated 25 years ago: good luck with your studies! -- Aron