Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!ucbvax!hplabs!hpfcdc!marc
From: marc@hpfcdc.HP.COM (Marc[e] Sabatella)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Ada Generics (was Which language to teach first?)
Message-ID: <5160024@hpfcdc.HP.COM>
Date: 16 Aug 89 15:47:45 GMT
References: <6448@ux.cs.man.ac.uk>
Organization: HP Ft. Collins, Co.
Lines: 22

>I don't know.  I tend to laugh when I get a non-trivial (and usually
>incomplete) spec for a trivial program, which is what most of the
>beginning CS programs tend to have.  It makes ADTs *seem* like useless
>overhead (they may not be, especially on larger projects, but tiny
>projects aren't the way to convince someone that ADTs are worth their
>cost).

Agreed.  But apart from the need to tell a student to include the "magic"
lines that give him access to I/O, I am in no way convinced that toy Ada
programs are inherently more difficult to write than toy Pascal programs.
The advantage I see, is that in *followup* courses, one could teach ADT's,
exception handling, concurrecny, software engineering, etc. without having
to switch languages, if the original language was Ada.

By the way, we had a particularly evil prof who forced ADT's on us by having
half the class write specs, the other half do implementations, and then played
mix and match with the results.

--------------
Marc Sabatella
HP Colorado Language Lab
marc%hpfcrt@hplabs.hp.com