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

["Dan'l Miller" <optikos@verizon.net>]

On Tuesday, July 10, 2018 at 6:14:34 PM UTC-5, Randy Brukardt wrote:
> "Dan'l Miller"  wrote in message 
> news:877d0a01-d342-433c-a541-3662736ae857@googlegroups.com...
> ...
> >I strongly suspect that was because of universities' desire for finding 
> >favor in
> >AT&T's eyes regarding coveted Unix licenses (pre-1984) and regarding
> >POSIX (post-1986) was a big part of that.  Sometimes AT&T's largess
> >walked in through the frontdoor of the revenue-generating admissions 
> >office:
> > for approximately a decade, vast quantities of AT&T's white-collar 
> > workforce
> >was offered free tuition and lavish 18-month sabbatical to get their master
> >degrees, fully paid for by corporate.  Low thousands  of employees signed 
> >up.
> 
> That was certainly my experience. About half of my graduate school 
> classmates (1980-83) were from Bell Labs. Not coincidentally, almost all of 
> the haardware at the University of Wisconsin ran some form of Unix. (The 
> outlier was the giant Unisys mainframe, which was rapidly being replaced by 
> VAXes.)
> 
> Of course, we had one professor who was interested in Ada, who got tapped to 
> teach one single semester of the compiler construction course, and thus used 
> an Ada-subset as the language for the class-project. And that happened to be 
> the semester that my roomate Isaac and I took the compiler construction 
> course, so we build a compiler for an Ada-subset. And my frustration with 
> the crappy languages available for the various early PCs that we worked on 
> led to deciding to build and sell a compiler for a better language that we 
> were familiar with. The rest is history.
> 
> So far as I know, nothing at UW ever used Ada again. Almost like it happened 
> solely to give me a career...

Sometimes the stars align almost inexplicably so that we are each given a window of transient opportunity to ‘live the dream’ in some way, but only if we recognize it and reify it.

Btw, Randy, thank you very much for •all• that you do regarding Ada, now and through all the years; your fortuitous career actually is elevating civilization.

Randy, do you remember the name of that professor at UW who inadvertently brought your vision for your lifework into focus?  (OP please take note:  that is precisely what a most-excellent professor does for students.)