Re: ADA and Pascal SUCK, C,C++, and Java are the only languages you need!!

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

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"Shombe Kroll" <Shombe@worldnet.att.net> writes:
>My first programming class in college was in ADA and I found
>it very difficult to learn because of the lack of documentation and help
>aids for the language.  That  forced me to rely on my Professor for help
>which unfortunately was like pulling teeth.

This is by no means an Ada problem.
There are a couple of good on-line tutorials.
There are some truly excellent text-books.
Our first-year students here have easy on-line access to the RM,
which _isn't_ introductory educational material, but if you have
a specific question, it's amazing what you can find.
There are Ada-aware editors including some with on-line help.

Your lecturer and tutors are *paid* to give you help;
if getting it is 'like pulling teeth', you have a legitimate
complaint which you should bring to your department.

We teach Ada in first year and C in second year (as a bread-and-butter
subject, not because C has any special merits).  I have inspected quite
a lot of Ada textbooks and more C textbooks than I can recall without
turning my stomach.  It is important to understand that most C _books_
are bad, except for the ones that are very very bad.  I have in mind,
for example, the textbook that said on p6 that all the code conformed
to the ANSI standard but had an example on p7 that violated it.  Beware
in particular of "A Book on C" and anything by Herbert Schildt.

Curiously, C is in many respects a much harder language than Ada.
You _can_ write excellent programs in C, but it is much more work
than it is in Ada.  I'm marking some graduate student code at the
moment.  One student in particular has written a program that is
actually going to be used in a major department store.  (They have
paid for it, and indeed, it's an upgrade of a program he wrote for
them last year.)  It's _supposed_ to be written in C, but in fact
it isn't.  I mean by this that it violates the C standard in many
completely pointless ways, which prevent it compiling under any
compiler except the particular compiler he used.  He didn't _mean_
to violate the standard (except for calling a couple of DOS-specific
'interrupts'), but that's what he ended up with.

-- 
John �neas Byron O'Keefe; 1921/02/04-1997/09/27; TLG,TLTA,BBTNOTL.
Richard A. O'Keefe; RMIT Comp.Sci; http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/%7Eok