Re: Ada for 1st year students

[Colin Paul Gloster <Colin_Paul_Gloster@ACM.org>]

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Amado Alves started this thread with a post which appeared on October
9th, 2008:

|----------------------------------------------------------------------|
|"Dear Fellow Adaists:                                                 |
|                                                                      |
|I have been blessed with the oportunity to teach Ada to 1st year      |
|students of a licenciate programme of informatics engineering at      |
|Universidade Lusófona do Porto.                                       |
|                                                                      |
|I seek advice from the vast wisdom in this forum, on:                 |
|                                                                      |
|(1) Textbooks. In Portuguese (Brazilian translation fine) or English. |
|Must be introductory, i.e. for students sans prior knowledge of       |
|programming in any language. Should be small or cheap (or both). The  |
|vendor should be prompt."                                             |
|----------------------------------------------------------------------|

Greetings,

I work in the original University of Coimbra, though not as a
lecturer. I have not noticed many Ada books in Portuguese. It may be
beneficial to have a list of such books (even if they are out of print
(it might be possible to borrow them from a library of another
university) or not the best (though warnings of bad parts of books
would be useful)) when I am asked for advice on how to learn Ada.

As for whether vendors are prompt or not, some are but in cases where
vendors were slow, they were slowed down by me (as many suggested that
I could try to run benchmarks but I must still write a significantly
meaningful representative body of code with which to conduct such
benchmarks).

|----------------------------------------------------------------------|
|"(2) Compilers. Must be free (as in free beer) or very low cost"      |
|----------------------------------------------------------------------|

Is this to teach the students that they shall live in poverty if they
shall not be self-sufficient by means of a discipline other than
informatics engineering?

|-----------------------------------------------------------------------|
|"(perhaps an educational license) and install out-of-the box on Windows|
|or Linux (or both, preferably)."                                       |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------------|

Aside from GNAT which had already been mentioned in this thread, I
suspect that one licensing option of an Aonix compiler might be
suitable. It used to be possible to get a cheap Aonix compiler many
years ago and I do not know whether that is still true.
Compilers are available affordably for universities from OC Systems (
WWW.OCSystems.com
) though not for Windows. Depending on the platform, Motif or
OpenMotif bindings are provided.
Janus/Ada and Claw are definitely available for a small amount of
money though possible graphical development for a project I am
involved in would not be expected to start for a long time and so I
have not used Janus/Ada yet.
An academic license from Sofcheck is affordable, though I do not know
what you would use for graphics.
You can telephone Mr. Lima of International Business Machines on 218
927 455 or 915 601 760 or fax him on 218 927 280 or Nuno Marques also
of I.B.M. on 218927380 or 917226179 re a teaching license but I do not
remember how much of a discount it would entail (it would be a bigger
discount than for collegiate research and I have not yet taken
advantage of an invitation to try a copy without committing in advance
to paying for it and keeping it, so I do not know whether a graphical
library is supplied). I.B.M. Ada compilers for Windows are no longer
supplied.
I do not know whether Irvine offers a graphical library.

|----------------------------------------------------------------------|
|" Must support Latin-1, preferably                                    |
|Unicode. The vendor should be prompt.                                 |
|                                                                      |
|[..]                                                                  |
|                                                                      |
|(4) Graphic or GUI library. (I want to be able to produce graphical   |
|output, not just the same old text output on a teletype-like window.) |
|Same requirements as above, plus: a simple or small API, eventually at|
|the cost of possibilities (e.g. may be limited to a single window, of |
|a single fixed size, limited number of colors). Should have some      |
|support for input, e.g. textboxes, buttons, mouse input. Should use a |
|simple fragment of Ada, viz. excluding OOP. Should support printing,  |
|or exporting to PDF or some such, or clipboard copying onto a "office"|
|document, or any combination of the above. Support for a picture      |
|format would be a plus (PNG, JPEG...)                                 |
|[..]"                                                                 |
|----------------------------------------------------------------------|

Furthermore, Amado Alves later emphasized in
news:1fe7f0a7-498c-4fd2-833f-ff223220dfc1@b38g2000prf.googlegroups.com
on the same day:
|------------------------------------------------------------------|
|"[..]                                                             |
|                                                                  |
|[..] Using JEWL and then telling my students                      |
|"if you want graphics you have to use Windows" will send the wrong|
|message I'm afraid... Not pedagogical at all."                    |
|------------------------------------------------------------------|

Support for character sets and graphics are not important for the
current parts of my work, so I do not confirm nor deny their
presence.

I have never used it, but you may determine for yourself whether Steve
Sangwine's PNG binding at
HTTP://PNG-IO.Sourceforge.net
is suitable.

Regards from Coimbra,
Colin Paul Gloster