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From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Subject: Re: Please Help.
Date: 1997/09/11
Message-ID: <dewar.873989183@merv>#1/1
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References: <01bcbcde$f8a425c0$ca70fe8c@default>
 <5v2qk5$cpu$1@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au>
Organization: New York University
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1997-09-11T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


Dale says

<<(note that Unbounded_IO is a simple package that i wrote). In my
experience variable length string handling is one thing that has
turned students off Ada a lot. Unbounded_String is a godsend in
this respect. It's a pity that a standard I/O package wasn't
defined in the standard for this type.>>

I actually find such claims incredible. I would never introduce
Unbounded_String to students till quite late in the class, since
this kind of concentration on featurism is exactly what you do NOT
want to teach students. Sure you introduce examples of abstractions
to teach students, but this is a bad example, because it has too
much complexity (particularly the reliance on controlled types).

To me, the idea that a student can be turned off because of a lack of
some particular feature in a language is like saying that students
are turned off chemistry because they have trouble with the analysis
of one particular compound.

Dale, are you really speaking from experience here? your own perhaps?
or from experience teaching. My own experience is that the one thing
that turns on or turns off students most is the professor. A bad
professor can make Ada a catastrophe from the students point of view,
a good one could teach 1401 Autocoder, and the students would be happy.
Of course students are not the ones to be able to judge curriculum
content in any case.

I do think that it is nice for students to be able to write interesting
programs without too much fuss, but unbounded strings are hardly a
prerequisite to this!