Re: Beginning Ada Programming, by Andrew T. Shvets (2020)

[Jere <jhb.chat@gmail.com>]

On Friday, April 17, 2020 at 8:44:30 AM UTC-4, Ludovic Brenta wrote:
> Andrew Shvets writes:
> > 1 - Well, to look at this another way, bringing in ideas from other
> > languages can have a benefit as well.  After all, just about every
> > language has its roots in a different programming language.
> 
> That's very true if your audience consists of language designers; not if
> your audience consists of end users of a language.
> 
> > 2 - In regards to the Fortran programmer that wanted to make Fortran
> > in C, that does happen, but that is not the case with most people.
> 
> I think the crux of the matter is who you decide your audience to be.
> 
> If you decide that you want to write a "Ada for Fortran/Pascal/C
> programmers" then they already know all about control structures etc;
> and you should dive into the type system upfront.
> 
I'll slightly disagree here.  As a person who came to Ada from other
languages, the first things I needed to know was how were things like
for loops and if statements handled differently in Ada.  You are 
correct that I didn't need to learn how a for loop worked, but I did
need to know how to construct a for loop in Ada.  Things like "in" vs
"of" for loops, how to exit loops, etc.  If a person is coming from 
another language, I would expect the first thing to do is help them
bridge the gap from where they came to where they are going:  show
them how to take what they already know and apply it to the new language.
Then teach new features.  Again, it's just my opinion, but it is 
based on my own experience trying to learn Ada.