From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.6 (2021-04-09) on ip-172-31-74-118.ec2.internal X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.0 required=3.0 tests=BAYES_40,NICE_REPLY_A autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.6 Path: eternal-september.org!reader02.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: "Jeffrey R.Carter" Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Ada versus Pascal Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2021 13:49:11 +0200 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Message-ID: References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Injection-Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2021 11:49:13 -0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: reader02.eternal-september.org; posting-host="1bce0c3576becf91431a005f3c3f71fe"; logging-data="6132"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX18p9mdtp2w/9WdMyG6i+/Wcu2scrkcvYu0=" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:91.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/91.1.2 Cancel-Lock: sha1:HO4nspOanyxQnVyIQIrIwn1CTWg= In-Reply-To: Content-Language: en-US Xref: reader02.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:63053 List-Id: 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