Re: Why is Ada a good choice for an ambitious beginner to programming

[wojtek@power.com.pl (Wojtek Narczynski)]

Bill Findlay <yaldnifw@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote in message news:<BA2E6605.168E%yaldnifw@blueyonder.co.uk>...
> On 23/12/02 20:15, in article
> 5ad0dd8a.0212231215.6ae81bf7@posting.google.com, "Wojtek Narczynski"
> <wojtek@power.com.pl> wrote:
> 
> > Bill Findlay <yaldnifw@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote in message
> > news:<BA2CCA4B.1617%yaldnifw@blueyonder.co.uk>...
> >> On 23/12/02 11:52, in article
> >> 5ad0dd8a.0212230352.11f8b886@posting.google.com, "Wojtek Narczynski"
> >> <wojtek@power.com.pl> wrote:
> >> 
> >>> Well, if you asked them, "Where does 'new' allocate memory?", 50%
> >>> would answer "stack", 45% - "heap", 5% would give you the correct
> >>> answer. At least this is the result I get with graduates that claim
> >>> that they know C++.
> >> 
> >> What is the relevance to beginners in Ada of your experience with
> >> graduates who 'know' C++ and are confused about it (unsurprisingly)?
> >> This is a strange basis for claiming that *Ada* is difficult!
> >> (Especially since the C++ answer is different from the Ada answer.)
> > 
> > Bill,
> > 
> > You may have not noticed that this question also applies to Ada, but
> > the answer is even harder than in C++.
> 
> Wojtek, we are talking about beginners here.
> 
> C++ beginners just *might* have to learn about placement new,
> to let them do things that are trivially easy in Ada;
> but, never having taught C++ to beginners, I could be wrong.
> 
> Ada beginners do not have any need to learn about storage pools
> (if their instructor is sane at ay rate).

Bill,

Looks like Ada is hard for me because I am a too curious and
impatient. All those generic formal parameters and levels of generic
instantiation, storage pools, requeues, task dependencies,
discriminants, unchecked conversions, freezing and finally some
syntactic weirdness that can only be explained with the evolution of
the standard in time, is too much for somebody coming from Java world.

Thanks for your time,
Wojtek