Re: Why is Ada NOT a good choice for a beginner to programming?

[Craig Carey <research@ijs.co.nz>]

The message (Mr Wirght's) is unclear on how Pascal is better.

The language Pascal was given as an alternative. If a person used Pascal then
the program could later be ported over to Ada 95 using NewP2Ada, that is
available from here:

NewP2Ada: http://www.mysunrise.ch/users/gdm/gsoft.htm#p2ada

NewP2Ada got substantially improved in the last week. The program is based on
ayacc (an Ada Yacc) and now it can very effectively port the bodies of Pascal
programs out to Ada 95. I just ported 342 spec+body files of German software,
from Modula 2/3 out to Ada 95. That led to enhancements being made to NewP2Ada.

The message I reply to, seems to not specifically say what is wrong with Ada 95.

The webpage sports a nice pithy [terse and full of meaning or substance]
description of what coding in Ada 95 is really able to be like:

|   Ada: An army-green Mercedes-Benz staff car. Power steering, power brakes,
|   and automatic transmission are standard. No other colors or options are
|   available. If it's good enough for generals, it's good enough for you.

    From:  http://www.workjoke.com/projoke20.htm  ; More:

|   Java: All-terrain very slow vehicle. 

The page is basically not mentioning Ada 95.


On Sat, 21 Dec 2002 13:30:34 +1000, "David Wright" <davidw@uq.net.au> wrote:
...
>To this end, I obviously need to commit to a particular language programming
>environment (not necessarily a GUI development interface); yet there seem to
>be several hurdles to even this crucial initial step.  It seems that there
>are three essential threshold requirements, namely:
>

A beginner might expect to have a quality text editor that can put the cursor
onto each syntax error and allow them to be corrected rapidly.

Someone using ObjectAda was aiming to get the default GUI replaced with
Codewright (and if that can be used then Slickedit could too):

At 02\12\16 08:10 -0800 Monday, S.H. wrote to intel-objectada@sf.aonix.com:
| This is from intel-objectada. Please reply to the list rather than the sender.
...
| [...] To redirect both standard and error output:
| 
|       adacomp test.ada > err.txt 2>&1

With a quality text editor. the structural reserved words of Ada 95 can be
coloured a Military green.

>1) A free (preferably) downloadable programming environment that installs
>without fuss and instability

The implicitly presented question is imprecisely posed.

>2) Good online and hardcopy support (tutorials and textbooks) for a BEGINNER
>PROGRAMMER per se, not just beginners with that LANGUAGE

The Internet has a grab bag of Ada 95 documents. Whisking them down can
take up 0.5GB of disk space.

The rest was on frustration. A person in Switzerland have been honing up a
solution for that: complaints can be diverted to forums on Pascal, and later
the source code (source and boyd files) can be ported back to Ada 95 with
great ease.

Another block structured language is Algol 60: it has the rudiments of a
successful language, e.g. the ability to have nested procedures inside of
procedures. There is an Algol 60 to C compiler here: 
   http://www.gnu.org/software/marst/

to go even further back in time, there is the B/C/C++ languages.
In a document that one would hope would briefly detail the rationale, there
is none at all:

   http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/chist.html :

>The Development of the C Language* 
>Dennis M. Ritchie
>Bell Labs/Lucent Technologies
...
>BCPL, B and C differ syntactically in many details, but broadly
>they are similar. Programs consist of a sequence of global
>declarations and function (procedure) declarations. Procedures can
>be nested in BCPL, but may not refer to non-static objects defined
>in containing procedures. B and C avoid this restriction by
>imposing a more severe one: no nested procedures at all. Each of the
>languages (except for earliest versions of B) recognizes separate
>compilation
...
>C has become successful to an extent far surpassing any early
>expectations. 

Just like error messages of C compilers, the problems are maybe slight, but
finding out what they are is a problem.


G. A. Craig Carey