Re: Why is Ada a good choice for an ambitious beginner to programming

[john@nospam.demon.co.uk (John McCabe)]

On Thu, 02 Jan 2003 21:32:26 GMT, Bill Findlay
<yaldnifw@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

>>> 400 not-especially-endowed-with-genius CS1 students have
>>> learned to program using Ada 95 at Glasgow University
>>> every year since 1996.
 
>> Coming from the (presumably) the bloke who co-wrote one of the
>> definitive Pascal manuals of the late '70s, early '80s, I would

>C'est moi. (Blushes.)

No need - it was a very good book in its time. I think I used the
second edition (that would be the one availabel in 1983) and found it
very readable. Having used Ada for so long now, it's quite funny going
back and seeing how different Pascal really is (and how limited the
early ISO standard Pascal was)!

For what it's worth, one of the main reasons there are so many
dialects of Pascal (I've used at least 3 - VAX, Tektronix and Turbo)
is due to the fact that it was really created as a teaching language,
so the standard features were *extremely* limited. Not so with Ada
which covers pretty much everything you could possibly want to do as a
learner, or an advanced programmer. Funnily enough, VAX Pascal had
many nice features that are essentially inherent in Ada - one in
particular I remember is being able to determine the size and limits
of arrays that have been passed in to a subprogram (this may be in
Turbo Pascal as well).

>> suggest this is quite an endorsement for Ada over Pascal.

>Ada is easier for beginners than Pascal, because its syntax and semantics
>are much more consistent.

I agree with this, but you definitely need to go for one of the books
written especially for teaching Ada *and* programming together. Norman
Cohen's book, "Ada as a second language", for example is not designed
to do that yet is (IMO) one of the best Ada books around. Ada comes
across as being such a large language that, without a good reference
guide to what you *need* to know, it could be very easy for a
beginning programmer to get lost in all the stuff you don't need to
know.

>> For what it's worth, I was taught Pascal at Glasgow University in
>> around 1983 (as part of an Electronics Engineering degree).

>It took ten years for EE to switch from FORTRAN to Pascal. Fifteen years
>further on, when CS adopted Ada 95, they tried to take EE with them, but
>without success. AFAIK they are still stuck with Pascal. (In fairness to EE,
>they did see through C, and did not want it taught to their beginners.)

That's interesting. I would have thought that after Prof. Lamb's
demise they would have a new leader who would be keen to make his
mark, e.g. by following progress :-)

>It was interesting to stand in the lab and watch CS (Ada) and EE (Pascal)
>beginners working side by side. One day, about week 6 of term, the CS
>students (using GNAT and AdaGraph) had nearly all successfully written a
>program that animated balls bouncing around in a box. The EE students (using
>Turbo) were nearly all grappling unsuccessfully with a trivial text-oriented
>read-process-output loop.

Interesting, but not really a very good example of why Ada is better
than Pascal. It could easily just be a mindset issue - people
generally don't enter EE courses to learn (or advance their)
programming skills. I would bet that most of your CS students have
done significantly more computer programming than the EE students
prior to starting their university courses.

Sometimes I wish I had done CS rather than EE - apart from the fact
the CS lot got far more interesting programming projects to do, there
were far more girls on the course :-)


Best Regards
John McCabe

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