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

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

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

                                       Randy.