* Resources for teaching a child Ada ? @ 2002-12-24 23:56 faust 2002-12-24 23:01 ` Michal Nowak 2002-12-25 0:36 ` chris.danx 0 siblings, 2 replies; 11+ messages in thread From: faust @ 2002-12-24 23:56 UTC (permalink / raw) My 12 year old wants to learn Ada ( He actually wanted to learn Java or Pascal but I convinced him that Ada is superior to both. ) Could anyone recommend a suitable text ? (Preferably online. ) -------------------------------------------------------- Come see, real flowers of this pain-filled world. (from Basho) ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 11+ messages in thread
* Re: Resources for teaching a child Ada ? 2002-12-24 23:56 Resources for teaching a child Ada ? faust @ 2002-12-24 23:01 ` Michal Nowak 2002-12-24 23:48 ` David Wright 2002-12-25 0:36 ` chris.danx 1 sibling, 1 reply; 11+ messages in thread From: Michal Nowak @ 2002-12-24 23:01 UTC (permalink / raw) On 2002-12-24 at 15:56 faust wrote: >My 12 year old wants to learn Ada >( He actually wanted to learn Java or Pascal but I convinced him that >Ada is superior to both. ) > >Could anyone recommend a suitable text ? >(Preferably online. ) Well, I looked over tutorials, which that I downloaded since I went into Ada. It may be hard to find something for kid with no programming background at all. But kids are smart, and get the knowledge fast. As I remember I was starting having only help files from Borland's Turbo Pascal compiler at age about 13 years old. You (your child) may look at "Ada 95 problem solving and Program Design" by M.B. Feldman and E.B.Koffman. It is written with easy language style, without additional formal wording. The sample programs are short and well described. I don't know if it available somewhere available on-line, but it is distributed with ObjectAda compiler from Aonix. Free, special edition is available for download at http://www.aonix.com/ As an additional book you may look at "Ada 95: The Craft of Object-Oriented Programming" by John English, although I think it is a bit more difficult than Feldman's. It is available at http://www.it.bton.ac.uk/staff/je/adacraft/ Good luck and happy Ada programming, - Michal -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- -- * ___ * _' ' * ` * ` * ' . -- / _ \ ' * | | * * * ~*~ -- | |_| | ___| | * _____ ` * ` * * ` i/:\i -- | _ *| | __ | | __' | * i/`:'\i -- |_| |_| |____*|_ |_____|_ Christmas with Ada: ` i/`':`'\i -- * ' http://www.autopen.com/OTANBAUM.shtml '^^^I^^^' -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 11+ messages in thread
* Re: Resources for teaching a child Ada ? 2002-12-24 23:01 ` Michal Nowak @ 2002-12-24 23:48 ` David Wright 2002-12-25 14:55 ` Michal Nowak 0 siblings, 1 reply; 11+ messages in thread From: David Wright @ 2002-12-24 23:48 UTC (permalink / raw) "Michal Nowak" <vinnie@inetia.pl> wrote in message news:mailman.1040770322.23621.comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org... > On 2002-12-24 at 15:56 faust wrote: > You (your child) may look at > "Ada 95 problem solving and Program Design" by M.B. Feldman > and E.B.Koffman. It is written with easy language style, > without additional formal wording. The sample programs are > short and well described. I don't know if it available > somewhere available on-line, but it is distributed with > ObjectAda compiler from Aonix. Free, special edition is > available for download at http://www.aonix.com/ Hi Michal, It's Christmas day here in Australia and this looks like a very welcome present. Just to be clear, before I download 75MGs of data. Is the F & K text distributed in .pdf format and among the files downloaded with the zip? Or does it constitute the on line help within the IDE itself (i.e., hypertext format)? Many thanks for this tip. Merry Christmas to all David Wright ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 11+ messages in thread
* Re: Resources for teaching a child Ada ? 2002-12-24 23:48 ` David Wright @ 2002-12-25 14:55 ` Michal Nowak 0 siblings, 0 replies; 11+ messages in thread From: Michal Nowak @ 2002-12-25 14:55 UTC (permalink / raw) On 2002-12-25 at 09:48 David Wright wrote: >Hi Michal, Hello David, >It's Christmas day here in Australia and this looks like a very welcome >present. It's also Christmas time on the opposite part of the world :-). I'm happy I was helpful to you. >Just to be clear, before I download 75MGs of data. Is the F & K >text distributed in .pdf format and among the files downloaded with the >zip? >Or does it constitute the on line help within the IDE itself (i.e., >hypertext format)? I'm sorry to say, bad rather bad news time time. The book is available only after installation of the compiler and it is in HTML format. I suppose, that to be OK with the law, you have to at least download and install the Aonix compiler to use HTML edition. Another solution is to purchase a printed version, but that may be not a best one, since you do not know what's inside and whether it will be suitable. Here is a homepage of Michael Feldman: http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~mfeldman/ there are some links at the bottom which may be of interest to you, particularly: http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~mfeldman/cs1book/ and click there "Introducing Algorithms: Adventures of the Spider" to get a sample from the book. Here http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~csci190/spring01/190s01ada.html you may find another tutorial by Michael Feldman. >Many thanks for this tip. You're welcome. Merry Christmas to everyone, - Michal -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- -- * ___ * _' ' * ` * ` * ' . -- / _ \ ' * | | * * * ~*~ -- | |_| | ___| | * _____ ` * ` * * ` i/:\i -- | _ *| | __ | | __' | * i/`:'\i -- |_| |_| |____*|_ |_____|_ Christmas with Ada: ` i/`':`'\i -- * ' http://www.autopen.com/OTANBAUM.shtml '^^^I^^^' -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 11+ messages in thread
* Re: Resources for teaching a child Ada ? 2002-12-24 23:56 Resources for teaching a child Ada ? faust 2002-12-24 23:01 ` Michal Nowak @ 2002-12-25 0:36 ` chris.danx 2002-12-25 0:45 ` David Starner 2003-01-02 14:11 ` Wes Groleau 1 sibling, 2 replies; 11+ messages in thread From: chris.danx @ 2002-12-25 0:36 UTC (permalink / raw) faust wrote: > My 12 year old wants to learn Ada > ( He actually wanted to learn Java or Pascal but I convinced him that > Ada is superior to both. I'm saying nothing about Pascal (haven't used a modern variant, still like TP though), but will say that Java is as good as Ada depending on what you want to do. For some things Ada sucks, for some things Java sucks. They're not superiour to one another just better at one thing which the other isn't. I would agree that Ada is (IMO) a better teaching language *in this context*, because you don't have to get into OO early, (java) packages, shallow copying, or stuff like that. Just my opinion (no flame war please). I often think language superiority is 90% personal preference, 9% problem domain, 1% technical. > Could anyone recommend a suitable text ? > (Preferably online. ) No text (though John English's online text is very good - see Adapower for a link), but something to make it more interesting. Jewl or AdaGraph*! The thing that kept my interest when I was learning to program (around the same age) was graphics and stuff like that. Text input interested me for all of five minutes, then I wanted to do something fun and playing with the graphics windows in Metacomco Basic (Atari ST) was it. After a month of Basic I got a pc with turbo pascal and the first thing I did was explore graph.tpu and do mad stuff with circles, lines, squares and what not. Make graphs of inputs and things like that. The tutors at Uni knew that people liked graphics, gui stuff and exploited it to make it fun. People hated the text io stuff but the graphics stuff they did held their interest. We had a number of problems to solve which people liked. One was to navigate a map with square cells and walls to get to the exit, another to land a rocket on a pad from a (fixed) launch position - in fact there was a crate of beer for the one who landed it in the shortest time; probably not a suitable reward for a twelve year old :) - and the other was planets orbiting the sun (just the earth, then with the earth and moon, then the same with darksides on the earth and moon - the darkside of the moon was tricky). Merry Christmas, Chris p.s. AdaGraph -> Jewl might be a good progression. Adagraph is just drawing in a window, but Jewl is a (simple) GUI toolkit. Once your son had some experience with Ada he might want to explore GUIs and Jewl would be good for that, it's very easy to work with and doesn't bog you down with some of the concepts of bigger GUI kits (which is a task in itself). *if it's Linux/Unix you'd need to write your own or write a wrapper round some GtkAda stuff to make it simple enough for a beginner to get to grips with. -- for personal replies change spamoff to chris ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 11+ messages in thread
* Re: Resources for teaching a child Ada ? 2002-12-25 0:36 ` chris.danx @ 2002-12-25 0:45 ` David Starner 2002-12-25 21:12 ` faust 2003-01-02 14:11 ` Wes Groleau 1 sibling, 1 reply; 11+ messages in thread From: David Starner @ 2002-12-25 0:45 UTC (permalink / raw) On Wed, 25 Dec 2002 00:36:29 +0000, "chris.danx" <spamoff.danx@ntlworld.com> wrote: >The tutors at Uni knew that people liked graphics, gui stuff and >exploited it to make it fun. People hated the text io stuff but the >graphics stuff they did held their interest. We had a number of >problems to solve which people liked. I think that's person specific. I hate doing I/O in all forms; I wish all programs were filters, taking input in and dumping output out (as a programmer, of course - interactive programs are nice for using.) Most of my early programming was writing exploratory math programs. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 11+ messages in thread
* Re: Resources for teaching a child Ada ? 2002-12-25 0:45 ` David Starner @ 2002-12-25 21:12 ` faust 2002-12-26 20:53 ` Stefan Skoglund 0 siblings, 1 reply; 11+ messages in thread From: faust @ 2002-12-25 21:12 UTC (permalink / raw) Actually, don't worry. I have decided to teach him Scheme. There is an excellent free windows GUI with graphical support that has been designed for beginners called Dr Scheme. -------------------------------------------------------- Come see, real flowers of this pain-filled world. (from Basho) ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 11+ messages in thread
* Re: Resources for teaching a child Ada ? 2002-12-25 21:12 ` faust @ 2002-12-26 20:53 ` Stefan Skoglund 0 siblings, 0 replies; 11+ messages in thread From: Stefan Skoglund @ 2002-12-26 20:53 UTC (permalink / raw) faust wrote: > There is an excellent free windows GUI with graphical support that has > been designed for beginners called Dr Scheme. Which is an excellent decision and also will make it easier for the boy to learn Ada later on. Try to make him use functional programmgin and he will be an happy camper later on. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 11+ messages in thread
* Re: Resources for teaching a child Ada ? 2002-12-25 0:36 ` chris.danx 2002-12-25 0:45 ` David Starner @ 2003-01-02 14:11 ` Wes Groleau 2003-01-02 17:44 ` Warren W. Gay VE3WWG 1 sibling, 1 reply; 11+ messages in thread From: Wes Groleau @ 2003-01-02 14:11 UTC (permalink / raw) > what you want to do. For some things Ada sucks, for some things Java > sucks. They're not superiour to one another just better at one thing > which the other isn't. I would agree that Ada is (IMO) a better Having just gotten a 97% in my first formal Java class, I'd have to say that for the pedagogical assignments, Ada would have been slightly better for most of them. Java was better for the O-O features, but _only_ because they were designed for Java's confusion between encapsulation device and inheritance device. More than once I noted that the assignment begged for Ada's enumeration types, numeric derived types, and/or subtypes. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 11+ messages in thread
* Re: Resources for teaching a child Ada ? 2003-01-02 14:11 ` Wes Groleau @ 2003-01-02 17:44 ` Warren W. Gay VE3WWG 2003-01-02 18:37 ` Wes Groleau 0 siblings, 1 reply; 11+ messages in thread From: Warren W. Gay VE3WWG @ 2003-01-02 17:44 UTC (permalink / raw) Wes Groleau wrote: >> what you want to do. For some things Ada sucks, for some things Java >> sucks. They're not superiour to one another just better at one thing >> which the other isn't. I would agree that Ada is (IMO) a better > > Having just gotten a 97% in my first formal Java class, > I'd have to say that for the pedagogical assignments, > Ada would have been slightly better for most of them. > > Java was better for the O-O features, but _only_ because > they were designed for Java's confusion between encapsulation > device and inheritance device. > > More than once I noted that the assignment begged > for Ada's enumeration types, numeric derived types, > and/or subtypes. And how about the lack of dispatching based upon return types? -- Warren W. Gay VE3WWG http://home.cogeco.ca/~ve3wwg ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 11+ messages in thread
* Re: Resources for teaching a child Ada ? 2003-01-02 17:44 ` Warren W. Gay VE3WWG @ 2003-01-02 18:37 ` Wes Groleau 0 siblings, 0 replies; 11+ messages in thread From: Wes Groleau @ 2003-01-02 18:37 UTC (permalink / raw) > And how about the lack of dispatching > based upon return types? That was not an issue in any of my assignments. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 11+ messages in thread
end of thread, other threads:[~2003-01-02 18:37 UTC | newest] Thread overview: 11+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed) -- links below jump to the message on this page -- 2002-12-24 23:56 Resources for teaching a child Ada ? faust 2002-12-24 23:01 ` Michal Nowak 2002-12-24 23:48 ` David Wright 2002-12-25 14:55 ` Michal Nowak 2002-12-25 0:36 ` chris.danx 2002-12-25 0:45 ` David Starner 2002-12-25 21:12 ` faust 2002-12-26 20:53 ` Stefan Skoglund 2003-01-02 14:11 ` Wes Groleau 2003-01-02 17:44 ` Warren W. Gay VE3WWG 2003-01-02 18:37 ` Wes Groleau
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