From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: a07f3367d7,c689b55786a9f2bd X-Google-Attributes: gida07f3367d7,public,usenet X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII Path: g2news2.google.com!news1.google.com!npeer02.iad.highwinds-media.com!news.highwinds-media.com!feed-me.highwinds-media.com!nntp.club.cc.cmu.edu!micro-heart-of-gold.mit.edu!newsswitch.lcs.mit.edu!nntp.TheWorld.com!not-for-mail From: Robert A Duff Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: for S'Image use Func?? Date: Fri, 07 May 2010 17:07:56 -0400 Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA Message-ID: References: <4be417b4$0$6992$9b4e6d93@newsspool4.arcor-online.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: shell01.theworld.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=macintosh Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: pcls6.std.com 1273266462 6652 192.74.137.71 (7 May 2010 21:07:42 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@TheWorld.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 7 May 2010 21:07:42 +0000 (UTC) User-Agent: Gnus/5.1008 (Gnus v5.10.8) Emacs/21.3 (irix) Cancel-Lock: sha1:rkzTsWDRx7RfKpqKuAdYZk+Tu3U= Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:11395 Date: 2010-05-07T17:07:56-04:00 List-Id: "Yannick Duch�ne (Hibou57)" writes: > So (especially if you're a teacher), ... (I'm not a teacher, although I've done some teaching of programming. I like to think of myself as a language designer, and part of my job as a language designer is to make the language easy to learn.) >...just provide them a package with > useful stuffs of the like. Yes, that can work. But it can also be confusing: the student wonders why Simple_IO is not available when they move to a different environment. >...This is how I first switched from a Pascal > dialect to Ada 95 : I could understand somethings, found it was not so > much easy at first glance, but still could create a package with > functionalities inspired from what's provided with typical Pascal > program ; then later just dropped this. > > The pending question may be now : when should students or beginners be > able to understand the concept of using an �external� component ? > Perhaps they should not start typing anything prior to that, and should > start learning, at the very beginning, listening someone recounting > them nice and happy stories involving basic abstraction principles :) Interesting question. I think beginners need to learn a few basic things (like how to use an 'if' statement) before getting into "abstraction principles". Dijkstra took it to an extreme: students have to spend a year doing mathematical proofs about programs, before they're allowed to compile or run their programs. I don't recommend that. ;-) - Bob