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From: "Marin David Condic" <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Beginner's Language?
Date: Wed, 9 May 2001 11:53:46 -0400
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Date: 2001-05-09T15:53:48+00:00
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(Something is wrong with how this exists in my newsreader. How did this
resolve to a single newsgroup called "iso-8859-1"??? I'm posting it to
Comp.Lang.Ada where I know it exists, but I don't want to spam a bunch of
other groups if it isn't in context there...)


"Ola Rinta-Koski" <ola@cyberell.com> wrote in message
news:x58zk6zjv8.fsf@arenal.cyberell.com...
> (let ((foo 0))
>   (dotimes (i 5)
>     (incf foo (read)))
>   foo)
>

Native language and verbosity issues being separate, it seems to me that
something like this is a more readable, more easily comprehended example:


with Ada.Text_IO ;
with Ada.Integer_Text_IO ;

use  Ada.Text_IO ;
use  Ada.Integer_Text_IO ;
procedure Example is
    X    : Integer ;
    Y    : Integer ;
begin
    Put_Line ("Hello World!") ;
    Put_Line ("Enter a number") ;
    Get (X) ;
    Put_Line ("Enter another number") ;
    Get (Y) ;
    Put_Line ("The Sum Is") ;
    Put (X + Y) ;
end Example ;

The statements are in plain English and one can readily guess at what they
do. It is also more representative of how most other languages would do the
same thing. (The structure would not be substantially different in C or Java
or a large number of other languages.)

I guess what is intuitively obvious to the casual observer is going to
depend on who is the casual observer. I've never found Lisp to be
particularly readable or easily comprehendable. I know numerous other
programmers who feel the same way. If you use Lisp on a regular basis, I
suppose it gets to looking "intuitively obvious" to you after a while. I
wouldn't ban the teaching of Lisp in a CS program, but I wouldn't make it
the FIRST language taught. I must not be alone in that thinking because I
know of many universities that offer courses that use Lisp, but they don't
start their students off with it.

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/