Re: Ada versus Pascal

["Jeffrey R.Carter" <spam.jrcarter.not@spam.acm.org.not>]

On 10/22/21 05:29, 711 Spooky Mart wrote:
> 
> What degree of learning curve is there to learn Ada, coming from a
> Pascal background? What kind of rough timeframes to get comfortable with
> programming without always looking to the manuals?

Pascal was the starting point for the Green language, which became Ada 
in 1980 (and also for the Blue, Red, and Yellow languages, which did 
not). Ada is firmly in the ALGOL family of languages.

There is a sequential subset of Ada that Pascal users can learn very 
quickly: the sequential language + packages (packages [modules] are 
fundamental to Ada, and you can't do anything useful without them). One 
should then quickly learn generics, as much of the standard library is 
generic. Ada's features are mostly orthogonal, so one can use this 
subset without surprises from the other aspects of the language.

One can then learn programming by type extension (tagged types and 
interfaces) and concurrent programming (tasks and their friends) to 
complete your understanding of the language.

I generally recommend /Ada Distilled/ 
(https://www.adaic.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Ada-Distilled-24-January-2011-Ada-2005-Version.pdf) 
to those familiar with another imperative language. It's ISO/IEC 
8652:2007 Ada, but you can easily pick up the new Ada-12 features when 
you've finished. (There's also now an Ada-12 version available on Amazon.)

-- 
Jeff Carter
"Make it right before you make it faster."
"Keep it right when you make it faster."
"Make it clear before you make it faster."
Elements of Programming Style
197