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From: Richard Riehle <richard@adaworks.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Why is Ada a good choice for an ambitious beginner to programming
Date: Thu, 09 Jan 2003 18:51:39 -0800
Organization: AdaWorks Software Engineering
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Date: 2003-01-10T02:42:41+00:00
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"John R. Strohm" wrote:

> MIT uses Scheme in the first-semester freshman programming course.  See
> "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs", by Abelson and Sussman.

UC Cal at Berkeley was doing the same for a while.  Have not checked recently
to see if they still are.

The important idea here is that any respectable computer science program should
ensure that students understand both imperative and functional programming.
Scheme,
Haskell, ML, or some other functional language will do just fine for the
functional
language.  Ada is probably a good choice for the imperative language.

Even so, every computer science program should have a class in comparative
programming languages so students get a strong whiff of Smalltalk, Ada, LISP,
C++, Eiffel, and various other languages.

Richard Riehle