Re: Ada2005

[Georg Bauhaus <sb463ba@l1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de>]

Carsten Freining <freining@informatik.uni-jena.de> wrote:
 
: Best example is the object oriented part, because it is not possible to have
: constants as components.

Others have hinted to non-defaulted record dicriminants,
and to constants declared in the same scope as the components.


:  We went through the rational and compared the stuff
: there with the Standard and we found many things, where ada 95 has been
: behind all other techniques right from the start.

Well, thats an incomplete statement at best.
? := {T| t is a technique}
I guess you are referring to a "principle" where one class
"is" one source file, like in Eiffel or Java with its ubiquitous
singletons? :-)

: Since I work at the university, teaching students about programming
: languages, I have to state, that it is not possible, to use the standard in
: education.

Now, you say "about programming languages". Does that mean
concepts of programming languages or concepts of programming?
Of course you cannot in general use an ISO standard for teaching
programming, or whatever. I guess you have not been considering
this, have you?  ISO standards are highly specialized
technical documents for people who have to understand every little
detail, and who are  familiar with the underlying concepts,
does this have to be said ?!



You can only use a subset of Ada, because most things are not
: understandable for students, especially in the beginning of their studies.

Is there any language for which this is not true???
Of course real life programming languages are anything but easily
understandable to the last bit.  It takes time and effort to
understand matters even in some languages that some consider "simpler"
than Ada. SICP, say, is not a book that you fully absorb in a few weeks if
you are new to programming and also have some other things to do (at a
university.)
Some have been _designed_ for teaching as if they were a subset of some
language, at least so it seems. (Logo, e.g.)

I
: think only to make the standard more clear it is neccessary to go through
: the standard and make important changes to clearify it.

Clarifying does mean what?  Some people prove things from the standard,
being "language lawyers" the need to be able to do so,
and how should that be possible at all were that standard so unclear?
If clarifying means easily grasped by beginning students, then, again
that's not what standards are for, don't you think? Why else would
we have text books?

Given that you want to expose students to programming language
concepts, then every concept is best captured by some language
that supports this very concept well. Trivially true. Some languages support
few concepts well, some languages support many concepts well or relativley
well. I think Ada is among the latter.

Given that you want to teach programming, there is more to say
aboubt choosing a language as a vehicle. One might asked others
about their experience in doing so, and one might weigh their
arguements and their non-technical preferences for a language
(something that appears to be much more influential in language choice.)
You can benefit from teaching tradition! Don't just browse standards
(you would have noted the record discriminants otherwise).

(If your teaching efforts are about OO, and if you will be teaching
newbies, perhaps even non-mathematicians, let me warn you that it might
turn out to be easy to explain inheritance trees or graphs in the
abstract, but, surprisingly, not that easy to explain what a function
or procedure is and does (Java experience, first steps leaving
static void main(String[] args) { interpreter mode code; }))

Georg
(not a university teacher, but having done some teaching;
not much, but even the few occasions over the years let
me think that it is definitely better to have a language
with clear and meaningful symbols and names, like Ada.
Cheers.>)