Re: List Container Straw Man

["Ehud Lamm" <mslamm@mscc.huji.ac.il>]

Nick Roberts <nickroberts@adaos.worldonline.co.uk> wrote in message
news:9sib28$13aeg3$6@ID-25716.news.dfncis.de...
> Well, I've shown a few examples of using my design. It basically requires
> two instantiations (one generic parameter each). Students could learn this
> pattern by rote until they got to understanding it (just like
Sequential_IO
> and Direct_IO). I can't believe that it's too complicated for anyone.
>

Essentialy I agree. I can live with giving an example, and saying "You'll
understand when you grow up."
My problem is on a more semantic level. To understand your approach students
must understand about inheritance (or so it seems to me). It is not like
instanating Integer_IO, which results in having "normal" procedures.

(And even this was deemed enough trouble, so Integer_Text_IO was defined).

Now perhaps my approach is all wrong - and people should start with
inheritance, only to graduate to old-fashioned procedural thinking.
I really am not sure. But as things are right now, many Ada programmers come
from Ada-83, not from Smalltalk... Many students follow a similar path from
Pascal/C to Ada/Java.

Ehud