Re: Book REview

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Richard O'Keefe said about Mike Feldman's book:

"        SUBTYPE Uppercase IS Character range 'A' .. 'Z';
        ...
        IF Ch IN Uppercase THEN ...
The preface says the programs are intended to be __entirely__ portable;
their emphasis.  Too bad about EBCDIC, ISO Latin 1, DOS CP 437, or any
of the IBM, HP, Apple, or other character sets where the capital letters
are not a contiguous range.  This method of checking for an upper case
letter simply cannot be used in any character set but ASCII.  Now Ada83
was ASCII-only, but Ada95 is not.
"

This is very confused on Richard's part. The Type Character is always
Latin-1, in which 'A'..'Z' is definitely contiguous. The quoted code
is correct Ada. Sure you could have a type EBCDIC which had other
characteristics, but Standard.Character itself is definitely ISO Latin-1.
I can't imagine exactly what gave Richard a contrary impression.

I did not read the rest of Richard's "review" in detail, but I should
say that I have been using this text in my CS2 course at NYU, and I
have found if very effective (I don't like the upper case keywords, but
that's hardly a significant criticism!) I particularly think that the
discussion of generics and abstract data types is well done.

No doubt one can find minor typos, but they have not proved a problem
for us using the book, and the examples on diskette (whcih are really
the only form in which students look at the programs closely) are
accurate.