Re: Ada for 1st year students

[mockturtle <framefritti@gmail.com>]

On Oct 9, 6:06 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.
>
> I seek advice from the vast wisdom in this forum, on:
>
> (1) Textbooks. In Portuguese (Brazilian translation fine) or English.
> Must be introductory, i.e. for students sans prior knowledge of
> programming in any language. Should be small or cheap (or both). The
> vendor should be prompt.
>
> (2) Compilers. Must be free (as in free beer) or very low cost
> (perhaps an educational license) and install out-of-the box on Windows
> or Linux (or both, preferably). Must support Latin-1, preferably
> Unicode. The vendor should be prompt.
>
> (3) IDE or text editor. Same requirements as above.
>
> (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...)
>
> I have knowledge, in various degrees, of various items in each
> category, but I will not name any at this moment, to avert
> prejudice ;-)
>
> Many thanks.

Well, an easy answer to your 2..4 questions is the GNAT solution
with the GPS IDE and GtkAda.  I'm sure that it works both with
Linux and Windows, since I work on Linux and my students on
Windows.  I never used GtkAda, so I do not know if it suits
your needs.  No idea about the book...