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=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,3885b7fd66a1db28 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-01-06 02:04:30 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!logbridge.uoregon.edu!kibo.news.demon.net!news.demon.co.uk!demon!not-for-mail From: john@nospam.demon.co.uk (John McCabe) Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Why is Ada a good choice for an ambitious beginner to programming Date: Mon, 06 Jan 2003 10:05:30 GMT Message-ID: <3e195055.2269693@news.demon.co.uk> References: <5ad0dd8a.0212210251.63b87aba@posting.google.com> <3e140e05.3654845@news.demon.co.uk> NNTP-Posting-Host: pipehawk.demon.co.uk X-Trace: news.demon.co.uk 1041847468 1775 158.152.226.81 (6 Jan 2003 10:04:28 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@demon.net NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 6 Jan 2003 10:04:28 +0000 (UTC) X-Newsreader: Forte Free Agent 1.21/32.243 Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:32607 Date: 2003-01-06T10:05:30+00:00 List-Id: On Thu, 02 Jan 2003 21:32:26 GMT, Bill Findlay 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 To reply by email replace 'nospam' with 'assen'