Re: Learning Ada (newbie)

[Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <9af9ao$6ee$1@taliesin.netcom.net.uk>, Ayende Rahien says...
>
>1. Where can I learn Ada? Preferably a turial on the web. I'm currently
>reading (http://www.adahome.com/Ammo/Cplpl2Ada.html) which presents some
>very interesting concepts (the fine-grained variables, frex), but it doesn't
>really teach much. I used to know Pascal (been several years since I program
>in it), and I know C/C++ pretty well. So I don't really need an interduction
>to programming, just to Ada itself.

AdaHome has some good stuff, but its a cobweb. You should go to AdaPower (
http://www.adapower.com ) and look around. There's a "Learn Ada" button on the
main page that will show you all sorts of good links.

As a former Pascal user, you shouldn't have too much trouble picking up Ada.
Tasking and Generics are going to be about the only totally new concepts (and
C++ has something close to Generics).

>2. Can you recommend a good IDE for Ada? Preferably for Windows.
Gnat with Emacs is generally the favorite of serious hobbiests. Emacs isn't much
of a GUI, but is very well integrated with the compiler and its tools and more
powerful than your typical GUI. If you are used to GUI's like Visual C++ uses,
you'd probably be a bit more comfortable with ObjectAda. However, ObjectAda is
not Free Software (just as Visual C++ isn't). But you can download a (hobbled)
copy of it from the aonix website. My website (see my sig) should have links you
can follow to download Gnat and Emacs for NT. There's links for a lot of other
goodies there too.

>3. I read in Jargon File that "hackers find Ada's exception handling &
>inter-process communication particularly hilarious." among other stuff. Why
>is that? What are the advantages & disadvantages of Ada compare to C or C++
>and other languages?

The author of the Jargon file (Eric Raymond), while brilliant, has a lot of
rather odd ideas about things (programming, Free Software, politics, marriage,
guns, etc). He isn't much of a fan of C++ either. In fact, one could argue that
he doesn't like any language whose sources can't be made to look like line
noise. :-)

For this reason, I'd advocate not using the Jargon file as a first reference.
Instead, use FOLDOC, ( http://www.foldoc.org ) which has a nice GUI interface,
and is maintained in a much more democratic manner. Some entries are taken from
the Jargon file where they are appropriate. (While you are there, don't miss the
entry for Shub-Internet -
http://www.foldoc.org/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?query=shub-internet ). Their entry for
Ada is much more even-handed.

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