From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,cb665c6c98eabf5d,start X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: Rich Maggio Subject: Ada for C programmers Date: 1996/12/21 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 205211354 x-nntp-posting-host: i123.226.world2u.com x-nntp-posting-user: (Unauthenticated) content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii x-trace: 851137816/19766 organization: Rich Maggio mime-version: 1.0 newsgroups: comp.lang.ada x-mailer: Mozilla 2.01KIT (Win95; U) Date: 1996-12-21T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: I just want to toss something out there to see what some of you think about this. When C++ became "all the rage", there came many books targeted to the C programmer that was moving to C++ and OO thinking. Wouldn't one for Ada be useful? I am not saying that C better than Ada or anything, but the fact of the matter is that there are LOTS of seasoned C programmers out there. If the idea is to try to "convert" as many C programmers over to Ada as possible, wouldn't such a guide/book be valuable to the "Ada cause"? Is there such a book? Has anyone contemplated putting such a book/document together? If such a book existed, it would have made my life much easier. I am not suggesting that it should be a translation manual, but more of a philosophical book. I found that I had to make some fundamental changes about how I looked at a problem in order to solve it with good Ada code. Letting go of "pointers all over the place" was hard. Grasping the concept of generic packages was difficult at first, but I was converted when I started really using them. A book that compared the C library concept and the Ada package (generic or otherwise) concept would have saved me quite a number of frustrating moments. I suspect that there are many other programmers out there that would share the same frustration. Any thoughts? As a side note - I am amazed by one thing with Ada: the fact that this stuff has been around since the early 80's. At work, we use C and C++, and my group is starting to make use of the STL (Standard Template Library). Everyone talks about how cool this is and how wonderful it is. I took a look at the book and was amazed to see that I was not looking at anything foreign to me - this was the same sort of thing I was doing in my class. And the language I was using supported this sort of thing (generics) back in the early 80's! So, this being the case, I can say that, even though I will not use Ada professionally (at least at my current job), it was a very worthwhile language for me to learn. Rich Maggio