Re: Expression Parser

[Ehud Lamm <mslamm@mscc.huji.ac.il>]

On Sat, 31 Jul 1999, David Botton wrote:

|I would like to point out that to my understanding there is a COM (aka
|ActiveX) interface available for the Lego_Mindstorms product.
|
|Therefore you can use it from Ada by just running BindCOM
|(http://www.adapower.com/com) on the COM object to produce a thick and thin
|Ada binding to it.

Sounds real nice. But points to another thing. Notice how beginners have a
hard time  with Ada? How often do we hear questions like "I am starting
with Ada, how do I..."? 

Having a good platform for starting out is crucial for language success
(in the hobby market at least), recall Turbo Pascal, BASICA/QBASIC etc
etc.

GNAT is great, but packaging it with mroe examples etc. esp. with easier
to understand Windows examples, and perhaps a GUI builder will help
greatly. Supplying a standard library of data structures and algorithms,
with examples of use will also be a step in the right direction.

Another idea is evloving something like PERL's CPAN. The Source Code
Treasury seems like a very good starting point.

This can be an intersting thesis work - infrastructure for reuse and
collaboration of programming language resources on the Internet.

Ehud Lamm     mslamm@pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il
http://purl.oclc.org/NET/ehudlamm  <== My home on the web