Re: Why is Ada a good choice for an ambitious beginner to programming

[Bill Findlay <yaldnifw@blueyonder.co.uk>]

On 4/1/03 22:55, in article av7olt$gh9$1@bunyip.cc.uq.edu.au, "David Wright"
<davidw@uq.net.au> wrote:

> 
> "Bill Findlay" <yaldnifw@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote in message
> news:BA3A5BF1.177F%yaldnifw@blueyonder.co.uk...:
> 
> : It was interesting to stand in the lab and watch CS (Ada) and EE (Pascal)
> : beginners working side by side. One day, about week 6 of term, the CS
> : students (using GNAT and AdaGraph) had nearly all successfully written a
> : program that animated balls bouncing around in a box. The EE students (using
> : Turbo) were nearly all grappling unsuccessfully with a trivial text-oriented
> : read-process-output loop.
>
> Hi Bill,
> 
> You've convinced me; but the CS students (using GNAT
> and AdaGraph) were enrolled in a formal course ...

So were the EE students.
In fact, they were enrolled in a programming module taught by CS.
(I was not teaching either group BTW).

But I don't want to make too much of this.
Certainly there were other significant differences between the groups that
accounted for much of the disparity, but I'm quite sure the EE group would
have made better progress with the easier language (i.e. Ada).
That's the irony.

> How can the self-learner find such interesting
> graphical programming projects in Ada?

Well there is nothing Ada-specific about them.
The same exercise could have been done in Pascal.

> NB!! Is there a particular text that you would
> recommend for this particular ball/box exercise and
> similarly engaging graphical forays?

I'm not a graphics expert, so I would just look to a basic computer graphics
text as a source of ideas. Others may be offer a more concrete suggestion.
Why not look at LOGO and LogoMotion(?) to see what's done there & try to
reproduce it?

> Incidentally, graphics programming is immediately
> engaging for a beginner for obvious reasons.

So is audio (especially music) processing, although the APIs are not well
supported in beginner-friendly software.

> This is not a plug for LM and I would like to stay with
> Pascal or Ada if I can get to grips with some exercises
> that inject some colour and fun into the process of
> learning (e.g., the ball/box graphics exercises).

If you are using GNAT on a Wintel system, all you need to get going is the
AdaGIDE IDE and the AdaGraph library package (and some neat ideas 8-).

-- 
Bill-Findlay chez blue-yonder.co.uk ("-" => "")