Re: Why is Ada a good choice for an ambitious beginner to programming

["David Wright" <davidw@uq.net.au>]

"Bill Findlay" <yaldnifw@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote in
message
news:BA3A5BF1.177F%yaldnifw@blueyonder.co.uk...:


: It was interesting to stand in the lab and watch CS
(Ada) and EE (Pascal)
: beginners working side by side. One day, about week 6
of term, the CS
: students (using GNAT and AdaGraph) had nearly all
successfully written a
: program that animated balls bouncing around in a box.
The EE students (using
: Turbo) were nearly all grappling unsuccessfully with
a trivial text-oriented
: read-process-output loop.
:


Hi Bill,

You've convinced me; but the CS students (using GNAT
and AdaGraph) were enrolled in a formal course and
could be streamed in interesting graphical directions
(balls bouncing in a box) by an all-knowing mentor.

How can the self-learner find such interesting
graphical programming projects in Ada?

NB!! Is there a particular text that you would
recommend for this particular ball/box exercise and
similarly engaging graphical forays?

Incidentally, graphics programming is immediately
engaging for a beginner for obvious reasons. Until I
saw your post I was leaning strongly toward committing
to LogoMation (NOT LOGO!!), an extremely user friendly
and immediately accessible environment for both
learning to program generally and programming animated
graphics for display on web pages. You may know the
software already. If not, the site is:

http://www.magicsquare.com

There is a fully functional downloadble IDE and the
Introductory Tutorials and Reference Manual are
excellent.

This is not a plug for LM and I would like to stay with
Pascal or Ada if I can get to grips with some exercises
that inject some colour and fun into the process of
learning (e.g., the ball/box graphics exercises).

Can you help?

Thanks again, in advance.

David