Re: Ada for 1st year students

[Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org>]

Amado writes:
> 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.

Great news.  Congratulations and I hope you enjoy it.

> 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.

John English, "Ada 95: The Craft of Object-Oriented Programming",
1997; available free of charge at http://www.it.bton.ac.uk/staff/je/adacraft/

The wikibook at http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming/; this is
not really a textbook but can be a good complement to the above.

> (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.

GNAT GPL Edition from http://libre.adacore.com, or call for tenders
from the vendors listed at http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming/Installing

Most GNU/Linux distributions already contain GNAT from the Free
Software Foundation.

> (3) IDE or text editor. Same requirements as above.

GNAT GPL Edition and Debian both come with the GNAT Programming
Studio.

> (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...)

For the GUI I would rule out both GtkAda and QtAda; not because they
are "bad" but because there are simpler alternatives for simple
programs. These alternatives are:

JEWL (John English's Window Library), comes with the aforementioned
text book; see http://www.cmis.brighton.ac.uk/staff/je/jewl/.
Unfortunately, does not support X11.

TextTools, a text-mode library for doing windows, buttons, scroll bars
etc; portable on multiple operating systems, and incidentally
available as part of Debian. See http://www.pegasoft.ca/tt.html

> I have knowledge, in various degrees, of various items in each
> category, but I will not name any at this moment, to avert
> prejudice ;-)

I have a prejudice against proprietary software, so I don't name
names, but there is a vendor in Madison, Wisconsin, who might be able
to help if you don't need compatibility with POSIX :)

--
Ludovic Brenta.