Re: Teaching C/C++ from Ada perspective?

[Maciej Sobczak <see.my.homepage@gmail.com>]

> Because Steelman was one of the highest achievements in the history of humankind

Did you consider a career in politics or religion or both? :-)

> Do you have a suggestion for any other language-agnostic set of requirements that serves as a measuring stick for what is a software-engineering-facilitating programming language and what is not?

The measuring stick for me is whether I can convince others or whether others can convince me. This includes factors that extend beyond any hypothetical notion of "purity", or whatever that at the end the industry does not care about. Like "do I have access to compilers for the given language"? Because obviously a language without the compiler cannot be "facilitating" anything.
So I'm rather practice-oriented instead of religion-oriented.

> The -man series is clearly language agnostic

If it's the set of requirements for the Ada language, then obviously it is not agnostic.

> because no less than 6 quite-different programming languages

Nope. All of them wanted to become Ada.

> C++ was in a legally-protected zoo of sorts, not subjected to this natural selection

And this is where I object. The "natural selection" does not happen by committee. The closest industrial analogy to "natural selection" is the tool market, where users are ultimate judges. And this is the arena where your historical and sentimental links are both impressive and useless.
Think about more recent programming languages, which do not have. For some reason most of them try heavily to resemble C++, but you cannot blame AT&T for this any longer. Now it's somebody else's fault, but this is how "natural selection" works.

And, BTW, we were supposed to help the OP, who was asked to teach C++.

-- 
Maciej Sobczak * http://www.inspirel.com