Re: Looking for good Ada95 book

[ok@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au (Richard A. O'Keefe)]

Jerry Petrey <gpetrey@gate.net> writes:

>I agree with Norman on this but unfortunately automatic formatters and
>many people will only write Channels_Allocated_To_Cbs, capitalizing
>only the the first letter of each word even when some are acronyms
>and should be in all caps.

The free program 'aimap' can be used to fix that.
I have never used an automatic formatter for Ada (it would be _very_
nice to have one when marking student code), but I can't imagine why
a modern formatter _wouldn't_ do something like aimap here.

>In any case, I think Feldman's book is still a very good book for
>its intended audience, in spite of this difference in style.

Nobody denies _that_.  The pity is that it would be even _better_ if
it followed the AQ&S guidelines.  We teach Ada in 1st and 2nd year
here.  Feldman has done too much good to the Ada community for us to
be able to ignore him, _but_ we have such a hard struggle getting
students to follow any convention at all (they _will_ indent by 8s
even when you tell them "use ^T to indent in VIle, not ^I") that the
_last_ thing we need is a book *teaching* them to use a different,
and significantly uglier, style.

For what it's worth, there are elements of my *preferred* style which
differ from the AQ&S guidelines, and I have deliberately switched to
someone I like less because I don't think my "rights" to write as I
prefer outweigh the _students'_ rights to be presented with *consistent*
good examples.

I like Barnes' books a _lot_.

-- 
Mixed Member Proportional---a *great* way to vote!
Richard A. O'Keefe; http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/%7Eok; RMIT Comp.Sci.