Re: 4 beginner's questions on the PL Ada

[Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se>]

Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org> writes:

> Well, it turns out to be more complicated than Ahn Vo said,
> because Ada.Task_Attributes[1] has to be instantiated with a
> definite type (it begins "type Attribute is private;") and
> String is indefinite.
>
> So it might look like ...

Thanks a lot. I'm not expecting anyone to produce that much code
in response to my questions, for the record. But if someone enjoys
writing it, of course, I don't have a problem with that, either.

> We don't like to post code that doesn't work

Of course, the code works! You are the Ada owls and foxes. Why
shouldn't it work?

> and producing a working example

It doesn't have to work *in isolation*. It can be just 1-3
lines. I am able to glue it together with my code. Almost all
programmers are.

> Also, we have an excellent on-line reference manual, though it
> takes a special kind of person to want to read it at bed-time!

Yes, I've read lots of books on Linux, Unix, some one theory,
distributed systems, DBs, etc., and some of those have been great,
but books on PLs are often, either

1) they try to learn you *programming* (in general) *by means of*
the particular language. "On the second line, you see some words
delimited by a pair of double quotation marks. This is a so called
_string_. A string..." - impossible to read,

or

2) they are reference books, for people who already know the
language, but not all of it, and sometimes forgetting details
(which happens all the time). From this kind of book, if you don't
know the PL at all to begin with, you can learn Basic, and
possibly C. What about C++? Lisp? I doubt a lot of people could do
it. Without rudimentary explanations, and especially *examples*, I
doubt save but a few could do it.

-- 
Emanuel Berg - programmer (hire me! CV below)
computer projects: http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
internet activity: http://home.student.uu.se/embe8573