Re: Ada for 1st year students

[Georg Bauhaus <rm.tsoh.plus-bug.bauhaus@maps.futureapps.de>]

Colin Paul Gloster wrote:
> On Sun, 12 Oct 2008, Georg Bauhaus wrote:

> |------------------------------------------------------------------|
> |"                                                                 |
> |[..]  I guess this then                                           |
> |will be the first time that the CS mathematicians start seeing the|
> |harm that their intuition is doing to computer programming..."    |
> |------------------------------------------------------------------|
> 
> What harm is being done?

Distraction from the topics of computer science (knowledge
of the computer).  Try to minimize things that (a) are not
about computers and (b) need additional knowledge of largely
unrelated detail.  IOW, CS should not be made a math review
course.
  CS needs to put limits on mathematical high school intuition.
E.g., if you want to study computers, and only computers,
then knowing sets is probably more to the point than knowing
integrals.

Example:
A type is a *set* together with a set of operations.

   type Colors_of_the_Rainbow is
    (Rot, Orange, Gelb, Gr�n, Blau, Indigo, Violett).

This is a set.  In

   Colors_of_the_Rainbow'Succ (Indigo),

Succ is an operation associated with the type
Colors_of_the_Rainbow. It takes a value from the set and
produces another value of the set, if there is one.
For Indigo, it produces Violett.

You can express Type + Operations as a tuple,

  ({Rot, Orange, Gelb, Gr�n, Blau, Indigo, Violett},
           -- the values
   {Succ, Pred, ...}).
           -- the operations

Is this, I guess algebraic style, typical of high school
mathematics?