From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.6 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,TO_NO_BRKTS_FROM_MSSP autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,5b062cdca243a886 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2001-08-01 07:47:44 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!newsfeed.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!feed.textport.net!newsranger.com!www.newsranger.com!not-for-mail Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada From: Ted Dennison References: <3B67526E.D7E19382@worldnet.att.net> Subject: Re: Please review and comment Message-ID: X-Abuse-Info: When contacting newsranger.com regarding abuse please X-Abuse-Info: forward the entire news article including headers or X-Abuse-Info: else we will not be able to process your request X-Complaints-To: abuse@newsranger.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 01 Aug 2001 10:47:37 EDT Organization: http://www.newsranger.com Date: Wed, 01 Aug 2001 14:47:37 GMT Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:10942 Date: 2001-08-01T14:47:37+00:00 List-Id: 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. --- T.E.D. homepage - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html home email - mailto:dennison@telepath.com