Re: Ada for 1st year students

[Gene <gene.ressler@gmail.com>]

On Oct 11, 9:35 am, amado.al...@gmail.com wrote:

> I share your stance on the usual GUIs being too distracting. Note I
> require simplicity, even limitedness, to avoid that. Like turtle
> graphics. But I want a couple input gadgets. Actually I was thinking
> of a fixed panel with a couple buttons, textboxes, and an output
> frame, and the studends only change the names of these components, and
> the API is totally imperative. Maybe next year... In the meanwhile, I
> think I'll go with AdaGIDE and JEWL.

We publish a very simple Ada turtle graphics written over GtkAda that
has a split window with graphics on the left and a console on the
right hand side.  There is a replacement interface for Ada.Text_IO
that writes and reads text strings in the right hand panel.  Mouse
input works in the left hand window.  There are a couple of sample
programs.  If you want buttons, you can easily implement simple ones
yourself, which has value of its own.

We have used this in a CS1-type course for a few years with good
results.  It runs equally well over Windows or Unix.

IMO the most valuable thing about this package is that the programmer
does Get/Put style I/O (even for the mouse) rather than handling
events.  Event-handing is too much for many beginning programmers to
understand because the handlers can be called in arbitrary orders.
They need to figure out what sequential execution is before they
should have to deal with that extra complexity.

See http://www.eecs.usma.edu/research/ .

Incidentally, we will move away from Ada in CS1 over my dead, cold
body.