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

[Brian Drummond <brian@shapes.demon.co.uk>]

On Sat, 30 Jun 2018 11:04:29 -0700, kouaoua16 wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> Ada is my programming language of choice. I have used it much in
> scientific programming. At an University I am asked to teach programming
> but in C and C++ to fist year students. After having spent some years
> with Ada, I'm relecutant to "throw away" my good programming habits from
> Ada and embrace C/C++. I would like to know if there exist(s) good
> book(s) at introductory level for C/C++ that may go in the spirit of Ada
> so that I won't feel wasting my time and energy teaching C/C++?
> 
> Also I will start the above course with Algorithms in which I have
> little knowledge. Any suggestions for good books on this topic?
> 
>
In some ways Steve McConnell's "Code Complete" may be a good book to look 
at... While it focusses neither on algorithms nor on teaching one 
specific language, it is strong on good practice for creating readable, 
maintainable programs.

He does have a few nice things to say about Ada - regrettably, usually in 
the past tense.

But much of what he pushes as "good practice" (which is optional in C or 
C++) would be enforced by Ada - many of his "bad" examples simply 
wouldn't get past an Ada compiler - many more than he gives Ada credit 
for.

I also like Luke's idea of teaching Ada and C and C++ in parallel - if 
you have to teach algorithms too, this idea may be supportable; you can 
introduce a safe and highly readable version of the algorithm in "pseudo-
English" like "for i in my_array'range loop ... end loop" before 
describing how it maps onto C and where the pitfalls are (arrays don't 
contain their bounds, the lower bound is always 0 and you have to pass 
the upper bound separately; don't forget it's one less than the length, 
security features, etc etc, - and how it maps differently to C++. Last 
time T looked, that was "don't use arrays, use std::vector instead", but 
that's probably obsolete now.

You don't even have to mention that the "pseudo-English" version will 
compile and run without the landmines...

-- Brian