Re: Ada Popularity Discussion Request

[Puckdropper <fake@fake.org>]

I'm a sophomore in a Computer Science degree.  When I found out last 
year that we were going to be using Ada to program, I was surprised to 
find it was still in use.  I had only read about it in some old books. 
I thought everyone used C except a select few who still hung on to BASIC 
(like me) or some other old language.

 From someone who's learning Ada, I'd like to suggest a few problems 
I've had so far in learning it:
1) Lack of good tutorial-type documentation.  (I can't find it if it 
exists.  Michael Feldman likes to do about 5 things per example in his 
books, and I don't want to do all 5, just one.  It's hard to extract the 
data from there.)
2) Poor explanations of what something does.  I'm looking for a sentence 
to a paragraph discribing what a package does, not what it includes.  An 
example of what I want is:  "AdaGraph is a package that allows for 
graphical programming and basic mouse control.  You are limited to only 
16 colors."

I suppose what would help Ada tremendously is doing something to be 
picked up by the news stations.  Unfortunately, news stations tend to 
want to warn you more than inform you.

Puckdropper
--
www.uncreativelabs.net

Old computers are getting to be a lost art. Here at Uncreative Labs, we 
still enjoy using the old computers. Sometimes we want to see how far a 
particular system can go, other times we use a stock system to remind 
ourselves of what we once had.

To email me directly, send a message to puckdropper (at) fastmail.fm