Re: Please review and comment

[Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <3B67526E.D7E19382@worldnet.att.net>, James Rogers says...
>
>listing common Ada programming idioms. This request seemed quite 
.
>contents. I would like comments on the current table of contents.

As a general comment, the organization seems a little backwards. The
organization you showed looks a lot like the organization of the LRM, which is
not exactly a beginner-friendly document. :-) It looks like you are planning on
presenting each feature of Ada, and then discuss what can be done with it. A
newbie is probably going to want to know the opposite: how one does X in Ada. 

The rest of my comments pretty much flow from the first one.

I don't see anything in there explicitly about strings. That seems to be the
newbie's biggest mental stumbling block with Ada, and I'm sure they'd go looking
for it in your document. There is a section on arrays, which presumbably would
include this information. But for a newbie, I'd suspect it would be more useful
to introduce the material as "how to do strings", then later point out that many
of the same techniques (excepting of course, the ones relying on Ada.Strings.*)
work for *any* array.

Also, there should probably be something in there on bit-accessable data
structures, like packed boolean arrays, rep-ed clause boolean-only records, and
modular types, and when each is appropriate.

I'd be sure to put in something basic on passing parameters. Newbies often have
the mis-impression that the data for all parameters is always copied, and thus
pointers should be used for efficiency.

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