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