From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.5-pre1 (2020-06-20) on ip-172-31-74-118.ec2.internal X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.0 required=3.0 tests=BAYES_40 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.5-pre1 Path: eternal-september.org!reader02.eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!news.dns-netz.com!news.freedyn.net!newsfeed.xs4all.nl!newsfeed7.news.xs4all.nl!tr3.eu1.usenetexpress.com!feeder.usenetexpress.com!tr1.iad1.usenetexpress.com!border1.nntp.dca1.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!buffer1.nntp.dca1.giganews.com!news.giganews.com.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 02 Nov 2020 15:14:04 -0600 Subject: Re: Beginning Ada Programming, by Andrew T. Shvets (2020) Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada References: <87muca3vgd.fsf@nightsong.com> <57d49047-0a61-4d13-8822-d004732a3acc@googlegroups.com> From: Norman Worth Date: Mon, 2 Nov 2020 14:14:03 -0700 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0 SeaMonkey/2.49.4 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Message-ID: X-Usenet-Provider: http://www.giganews.com X-Trace: sv3-dKCzwvdWL+gr5Hp0PwFXTGctW4huUngCUkJrE5/RZWBiRzFXxCQr09GSDtrKaMO0zfqSilXiz+Yn4eg!J/mZ10PuGVm8jfBUHDAtBjBheE2w3L7kfA5d+wnUeDYoekYbCs4s6z/4LkUWidn37TsXOXxgXfnQ X-Complaints-To: abuse@giganews.com X-DMCA-Notifications: http://www.giganews.com/info/dmca.html X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.40 X-Original-Bytes: 2521 Xref: reader02.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:60539 List-Id: J-P. Rosen wrote: > Le 03/12/2019 à 13:33, Lucretia a écrit : >>> Yes, he is. I had a little conversation on the very first edition >>> with him. I esp. objected that he started his examples with using >>> Integer rather than user-defined types (which IMHO is the very >>> heart of Ada). I do not know whether he changed this. > >> There's nothing wrong with using integer to start off and then moving >> onto defined types. > Yes there is! (see my paper at the last Ada-Europe). The first message > when you teach Ada is that it is all about defining proper types. You > have to start by fighting bad habits from other languages. > One of the most difficult things for programmers to graft these days is the concept and proper use of types, which is key to Ada. Ada makes this even more complicated with the very useful attributes of private and limited types. Unless a text clearly conveys the use of types and illustrates it throughout, it is useless for teaching people Ada. Since this is a foreign concept to most current programmers, illustrations and good exercises are needed, too. Compare this text to Barnes, which most of us use as a quick reference.