"Subtract C, add Ada"

[mg@asp.camb.inmet.com (Mitch Gart)]

In the Dec. 12 PC Week, next to the review of Alsys ActivAda, 
was this sidebar by Peter Coffee:


Subtract C, add Ada: Results multiply
-------------------------------------

Few managers can afford to do a software project several times,
using teams with similar experience but different programming
tools, to see if anything yields consistent improvements in speed
or quality of work.  At the State University of New York, Plattsburgh,
though, Professor John McCormick has assigned the same project to
each of his classes for about nine years, but switched languages
in mid-decade.

Working in teams of three or four, McCormick's real-time-programming
students must write 15,000 lines of code to control a system that 
would need about 150 switches to operate using hardware alone.  In the 
five years students used C, no team completed the project - even when
more than half of the code was provided.  With Ada, however, half of
the teams completed the project before any support code had even been
written.  With some support code now provided, three out of four teams
finish the project.

Specific factors in this improvement, according to McCormick, include
both syntax and semantics.  Ada leaves less room for single-keystroke
errors, such as the common C error of using = (assignment) instead of
== (comparison); its type-abstraction facilities reduce the need for
error-prone pointer manipulation; and its modular facilities improve
teams' coordination of effort.

This experience, McCormick notes, "has convinced all my faculty
colleagues to support teaching Ada in our beginning courses.  This
spring semester, the first studentw with Ada as their mother tongue
will enroll in my course.  I can only imagine what these teams will
accomplish".