Re: Ada for 1st year students

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

On Oct 9, 12:06 pm, amado.al...@gmail.com wrote:
> Dear Fellow Adaists:
>
> I have been blessed with the oportunity to teach Ada to 1st year
> students of a licenciate programme of informatics engineering at
> Universidade Lusófona do Porto.
>
> (4) Graphic or GUI library. (I want to be able to produce graphical
> output, not just the same old text output on a teletype-like window.)
> Same requirements as above, plus: a simple or small API, eventually at
> the cost of possibilities (e.g. may be limited to a single window, of
> a single fixed size, limited number of colors). Should have some
> support for input, e.g. textboxes, buttons, mouse input. Should use a
> simple fragment of Ada, viz. excluding OOP. Should support printing,
> or exporting to PDF or some such, or clipboard copying onto a "office"
> document, or any combination of the above. Support for a picture
> format would be a plus (PNG, JPEG...)

We have been using a "Turtle Graphics" implementation that hides the
complexity of GtkAda for beginning programmers.  It works pretty
well.  By the end of a semester, nearly all students are able to
design and implement a fairly elaborate game, graphical simulation, or
similar program. We couldn't get there with bare GtkAda. The TG
package runs without modification under Linux, Solaris, and Windows.
Only the build command is different.  See http://www.eecs.usma.edu/research/
.  If you decide to use it, I'd be happy to answer any questions.