New in Ada, written some programs and earned money!

[Frank Piron <frank.piron@konad.de>]

Hi Ada,

I'm new in Ada, really new, that is i started to
learn the language 3 months ago.

My previous experiences in programming were in
pure C and ORACLE PL/SQL 2.3 - much like Ada83
i think. 4 years ago we started development of
a complete control system for a police department
in switzerland. It is ORACLE-based, contains
a workflow engine, document management, GUI in
ORACLE-Forms, much PL/SQL-Code inside the Database,
much exception handling.

The demands of the customer concerning stability and
security were very strict and we expensively used
the exception handling mechanism of PL/SQL. But this
Language is pretty restricted in respect to modern
software engineering methods and last year meanwhile
in the own company i encountered Ada95.

I read some books ( Barnes , Feldman, ... ) and started
to play around and i felt good with my PL/SQL-experiences.

3 weeks ago i delivered my first little programs in Ada which
i used to write in C earlier, when the capabilities of the
poor ORACLE-Client PL/SQL-engine did not suffice.

The programs were simple helpers, one parsing a file
written in a proprietary format, one calling some
win32 api functions. But i was curious to know more
about string handling in Ada and interfacing with C.

Great success! Simple development, no errors till
now. Ok, i had my fight with the compiler, but it
was productive. 

I think the Ada community should try to get the
attention of the many many PL/SQL-Developers in the
world. Ada is an ideal way to enrich the programming
skills and possibilities for them.

Frank Piron