Re: Ada in teaching

["(see below)" <yaldnif.w@blueyonder.co.uk>]

On 15/07/2009 00:42, in article
4a5d17f2$0$30231$9b4e6d93@newsspool1.arcor-online.net, "Georg Bauhaus"
<rm.tsoh.plus-bug.bauhaus@maps.futureapps.de> wrote:

> Could there be "canonical Ada" good for teaching?
> Some subset possibly extracted from successful
> introductory courses/books.  Such as, maybe, John English's?
> (Does someone know whether Robert Dewar's plan still exists to
> collect (his) teaching efforts at NYU into a book on Ada?)

Introductory courses must teach a subset, even of Pascal.
The make-up of the subset is determined by the need for a digestible
presentation of the material to be covered in the time available.
It is also influenced by the teacher's theological position, e.g., whether
to start with an OOP slant or not.
These considerations (especially course time) don't leave much wiggle room.

Second-level courses start to tackle the tricky stuff.

> Norman H. Cohen (author of "Ada as a Second Language")
> has been involved in designing Java generics (Don't
> know more).

As was an ex-colleague of mine (Phil Wadler).

> Java arrays cannot fully take advantage of Java generics,
> in particular compile time checking is basically off,
> so the sloppy base type system strikes again.
> Another language corner case that I imagine must be explained
> to students of the (Java) language at length...

The extensions that have been made to Java to try to fit it for applications
to which it is inherently unsuited are all laughably bad, in my view.

-- 
Bill Findlay
<surname><forename> chez blueyonder.co.uk