Re: Looking for a good Ada 95 book

[jhopper@erinet.com (jim hopper)]

In article <1996Nov23.082018.1@eisner>
kilgallen@eisner.decus.org (Larry Kilgallen) writes:

> In article <dewar.848712351@merv>, dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:
> 
> > Students should NOT be encouraged to think that figuring out your own
> > style is a normal and reasonable activity, on the contrary, they should
> > learn that in the real world, an external style is imposed and you
> > have to follow it. Encouraging this kind of individuality to me is
> > inconsistent with good engineering practice. It would be like telling
> > chemistry students in the lab to develop their own distinctive styles
> > of doing experiments.
> 
> If students do not experiment with styles, they will be ill-prepared to
> contribute to the style discussion when a group such as that which wrote
> GNAT chooses a style (as described many bytes ago in this newsgroup).
> 
> Larry Kilgallen


I have to agree with Larry here.  If the students are never taught to
think critically about an issue, only to blindly follow standards then
they will never be able to meaningfully participate in evolving these
standards!  Thats why students should be FORCED (in my not so humble
opinion) to use a variety of styles and to understand the good and bad
points between them.  Note, i am thinking not just in the limited case
of capitalization style but all elements of programming style
(including capitalization).

Roberts comment that styles in the real world are imposed upon you is
an excellent point. But in fact, in the real world during a career,
MULTIPLE styles will be imposed upon a programmer. For example in the
last two years i have had at least 3 different styles imposed upon my
by the various prime contractors we have worked with, and i have
imposed my prefered style on our Ada folks at SAIC in dayton for our
internal work. :-) The best way to teach this (again IMNSHO) is to
train them by imposing various styles during their training to shake
them out of their religious opinions, and force them to understand the
issues that underly stylistic choices.

best jim