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From: "Jeffrey R. Carter" <spam.jrcarter.not@spam.not.acm.org>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: New to Ada, why these warning messages?
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2016 16:50:41 -0700
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Date: 2016-01-01T16:50:41-07:00
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On 01/01/2016 01:20 PM, Dale Dellutri wrote:
> 
> Also, a good first Ada book?
> 
> I found "Programming in Ada 2012" by John Barnes.  It's rather
> large.  I was hoping for something like "The C Programming
> Language, 2nd edition" by Kernighan and Ritchie.  Is there
> anything that concise?

Barnes is good and very comprehensive, if expensive and heavy. Since you have
programming experience , I recommend /Ada Distilled/, available at

http://www.adaic.org/learn/materials/

specifically,

http://www.adaic.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Ada-Distilled-24-January-2011-Ada-2005-Version.pdf

It's for ISO/IEC 8652:2007, but if you need Ada 12 it's easy enough to pick up
the new stuff. Rumor has it there's an Ada-12 version coming soon.

> (My goal is to determine whether it would be better to convert
> a large cache of Fortran 95 programs to C or Ada.  I already
> know the problems converting to C.  I need to convert some
> Fortran programs to Ada to determine what problems might occur.)

We have hard data across multiple application domains showing that deployed C
has 4 times the errors of deployed Ada. I'm not aware of any data for Ada
compared to Fortran, but I wouldn't be surprised if Ada has an edge there, too.
So if this is a cost-plus DoD project doing this to drive up costs through
unnecessary work, converting to C is the way to go. Where correctness is
tantamount, Ada is the language of choice.

-- 
Jeff Carter
"Run away! Run away!"
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
58