The Ada way of programming

The Ada way of programming

[alb348]

What books / online resources would you suggest to a beginner who wants to learn the Ada way of programming? By this I mean the general guidelines of good programming for Ada (as opposed to the syntax and the other details of the language).
I am particularly interested in the way programs are designed (from a high-level viewpoint) and in the phases of development.

Feel free to share, in your replies, your thoughts on what, according to you, is the "Ada way", especially about program design.

Re: The Ada way of programming

[Florian Weimer]

* alb:

> What books / online resources would you suggest to a beginner who
> wants to learn the Ada way of programming? By this I mean the
> general guidelines of good programming for Ada (as opposed to the
> syntax and the other details of the language).

I suspect there isn't much agreement on that.  Different projects use
different guidelines and encourage or prohibit the use of different
language features.

Re: The Ada way of programming

[Georg Bauhaus]

On 25.12.12 17:58, Florian Weimer wrote:
> * alb:
>
>> What books / online resources would you suggest to a beginner who
>> wants to learn the Ada way of programming? By this I mean the
>> general guidelines of good programming for Ada (as opposed to the
>> syntax and the other details of the language).
>
> I suspect there isn't much agreement on that.  Different projects use
> different guidelines and encourage or prohibit the use of different
> language features.

There might be a trend in the Ada way, though, produced by more
recently educated programmers and more recently made versions of Ada.

You'd meet it when there are many anonymous pointers, and, possibly,
when nesting is hardly ever used. That's because a programmer coming
from C++ is not used to parameter modes, and neither to what can be
achieved using hierarchies.
The latter has always been controversial, I think ("nesting is
for the birds"), but leads to different designs.
The former just needs to be popularized, and should lead to better
designs if one without public pointing is better.

I'd also be suspicious of expositions that use the predefined
(and implementation-defined) types a lot, e.g. Integer.

Re: The Ada way of programming

[Shark8]

On Thursday, December 27, 2012 3:30:09 PM UTC-6, Georg Bauhaus wrote:
> 
> You'd meet it when there are many anonymous pointers, and, possibly,
> when nesting is hardly ever used. That's because a programmer coming
> from C++ is not used to parameter modes, and neither to what can be
> achieved using hierarchies.
> The latter has always been controversial, I think ("nesting is
> for the birds"), but leads to different designs.

Which is really rather sad; nesting helps one organize in such a way that an error-fix has limited impact on the rest of the source text. It helps facilitate structured programming (to such a degree anyone who is vehemently anti-goto ought to embrace nesting)

Re: The Ada way of programming

[Jacob Sparre Andersen]

alb348@gmail.com writes:

> What books / online resources would you suggest to a beginner who
> wants to learn the Ada way of programming?

Read the Ada 95 Quality and Style Guide for guidelines and
"Object-Oriented Software in Ada 95" for a textbook introduction to the
language.  The former should be freely awailable for download, and if
the latter is prohibitively expensive, I think most recent Ada textbooks
are reasonably close to good Ada culture in their way of teaching
programming.

It is my impression that too many people programming in Ada (including
myself) tend to have a bad habit of making premature optimisation of
tasking even if they would never do it for non-tasking applications.  I
have a two Ada books with a focus on tasking in the office, but I
haven't gotten around to see how they cover the subject yet.

Greetings,

Jacob
-- 
"Universities are not part of the nation's security organisation,
 they are not the nation's research laboratory either: they are
 the nation's universities."                     -- E.W. Dijkstra