Re: Beginner's Language?

["Marin David Condic" <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com>]

If it were me, I'd just use Ada and be done with it. However, some people
may have too much of an anti-Ada bias and would refuse to use it in their
course - in which case I'd suggest considering Pascal or some other similar
language that is reasonably well known and available & provides the right
sort of constructs for teaching about how to think about programming.

You're right - there is no advantage over Ada. This is especially true since
Gnat is generally available, of descent quality and has plenty of
educational materials associated with it. A prof can hand students an
intro-level text, a compiler, an IDE with debugging capabilites and plenty
of examples of working code - all of it free or reasonably inexpensive (The
book is about all you'd have to pay for.) Syntactically and semantically,
Ada is better than Pascal & many other languages and offers plenty of room
for the student to grow. I'd use Ada for an intro class and not look back -
but obviously some people have an irrational attitude about it. (Just lets
watch how long it takes the cross-posting of this thread to bring out the
Anti-Ada bigots who know nothing of the language and have never used it, yet
*know* they hate it. :-)

I had a prof in business school who taught MIS for MBA's. He found out I
used Ada on the job and immediately began snearing at it and commenting on
it with contempt and wondering who it was who was "forcing" us to use Ada.
In conversation, I discovered that he knew *nothing* of Ada beyond rumors.
He was pretty well astonished that we would use Ada *by*choice* because we
found it technically superior. If this is the sort of prof who proposes
teaching an intro level class on programming, I'd rather he at least went
with Pascal rather than trying to teach beginners with C++ or something
equally unsuitable.

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/


"Tarjei T. Jensen" <tarjei.jensen@kvaerner.com> wrote in message
news:9d867n$ort13@news.kvaerner.com...
> But none of these are any improvement on Ada or sufficiently different to
be
> of paedagogic value. Well, perhaps Delphi for a windows project to
> familiarize student with windows programming.
>