Re: Learning Ada (newbie)

["chris.danx" <chris.danx@ntlworld.com>]

"Ayende Rahien" <Dont@spam.me> wrote in message
news:9af9ao$6ee$1@taliesin.netcom.net.uk...
> 1. Where can I learn Ada? Preferably a turial on the web. I'm currently
> reading (http://www.adahome.com/Ammo/Cplpl2Ada.html) which presents some
> very interesting concepts (the fine-grained variables, frex), but it
doesn't
> really teach much. I used to know Pascal (been several years since I
program
> in it), and I know C/C++ pretty well. So I don't really need an
interduction
> to programming, just to Ada itself.

You should try the lovelace tutorial, it's great.  Do you know
www.Adapower.com?  if not bookmark it, it's good for all sorts of Ada
related stuff.  There's a link to the tutorial in there.  Also try
http://www.diax.ch/users/gdm/pascada.htm by Gautier de Montmollin.  It's
good too.

I might also do an introduction to Ada for programmers soon.  The OS
developer i work with is considering a switch from C to Ada and he knows
Pascal well, so i might do it to help him out.  Maybe try
http://willow.os-4u.com in the (near?) future.  This is my new programming
site so be patient.

> 2. Can you recommend a good IDE for Ada? Preferably for Windows.

AdaGIDE is the best IMO, again you'll find links to it at AdaPower.

> 3. I read in Jargon File that "hackers find Ada's exception handling &
> inter-process communication particularly hilarious." among other stuff.
> Why is that?

Dunno, i think exception handling in Ada is simple and powerful.  None of
that
    try {}
    catch {}

nonsense.  Ada's handling is simple, effective, uniform and less verbose
than C++ and Java.

> What are the advantages & disadvantages of Ada compare to C or C++
> and other languages?

Ada is a standard and a validated compiler has undergone testing with
massive test suite.  C compilers can't even agree on the size each of the
member of integer type family.  Ada's advantages over C are numerous, too
numerous to go into.  You might be interested to know that when I came to
Ada initially (just over a year ago), I didn't hold it in such high regard.
Now I use it lots and really like it.


Hope this helps,
Chris Campbell