Re: Ada in colleges and universities.

["Peter C. Chapin" <pchapin@sover.net>]

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Bj�rn Persson <spam-away@nowhere.nil> wrote in news:zD2xc.95220$dP1.306334
@newsc.telia.net:

> That seems very strange to me. In the university courses in programming 
> I've taken, they first taught us functional programming in Scheme and 
> then imperative programming in Pascal. Then we moved on to 
> object-oriented programming in Java, modelling in UML, and a kind of 
> mathematical notation for data structures. There was even time for some 
> BNF. That was all in courses intended to be equivalent to about 20 weeks 
> of full time studying, and meant for students who hadn't programmed 
before.

You are probably talking about a computer science program, true? VTC 
offers computer engineering technology. It's more like computer 
engineering which, in turn, is more like electrical engineering than it is 
like computer science. Our students get a lot of hardware courses, 
including basic (and not so basic) electronics. The programming we are 
preparing them for is low level stuff... device drivers, embedded systems, 
specialized executives, etc. We tend to be relatively light on abstract 
theory and heavy on the "practical" construction of systems. If I suggest 
that we reintroduce Ada in the curriculum I know the question will be: 
"How much Ada is being used, relative to C, in the application domains we 
focus on?" How should I best answer a question like that?

Peter