Re: A question for my personal knowledge.

[Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-dejanews.com>]

In article <37382B0C.A95B6745@bigfoot.com>,
  Roy Grimm <ragrimm@bigfoot.com> wrote:
> If they don't know those concepts, learning a new language in
> and of itself certainly isn't going to help them.  They
> *should* know all that as a result of the training they
> received before they took the job in the first place.

Well I won't disagree with your *should* here (indeed I think
they should have learned Ada as part of this training, since it
is a much better introduction to these critical concepts).

But you are in my experience quite wrong to think that learning
a new language does not help. On the contrary, switching to a
new language often illuminates principles that are hard to
understand in a language that does not support or is actively
hostile to these principles.

For example, Fortran programmers were quite puzzled by EWD's
letter to the ACM on gotos, but this was totally familiar to
all Algol programmers.

Once you understand the details of separation of spec and
implementation, you can indeed apply this even in languages
which are really not very hospitable to the notion, but the
experience I have seen is that typical C programmers do NOT
have a good understanding of this separation, and learning
Ada is very helpful in gaining this understanding.

Roy, what is your experience with Fortran or C programmers
switching to Ada, does it match this? (indeed, do you have
direct experience with projects making such a switch?)


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