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Sender: "Team Ada: Ada Advocacy Issues (83 & 95)" <[log in to unmask]>
X-To: "W. Wesley Groleau x4923" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1998 16:17:49 -0500
Reply-To: Jack Beidler <[log in to unmask]>
From: Jack Beidler <[log in to unmask]>
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Organization: University of Scranton
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"W. Wesley Groleau x4923" wrote:

> > .....  After
> > seeing Ada in two courses, our students take our operating system course
> > using C.  We do not teach them C, they pick it up during the first
> > couple of weeks in the Op. Sys. course.  The first time we did this, I
> > was concerned about the transition because the guy who teaches OS did
> > not know Ada.  His experience was:
> >
> > 1.  The students ask the right questions, like
> >     "How do I package in this language?"
> > 2.  They use variable names that are more than two letters long.
> > 3.  They do not abuse the ++ operator.
> > 4.  They write readable C programs.
>
> Just to play Devil's Advocate, do they learn the hard way about the value
> of the things they lose by changing languages?  (abstraction support, type
> checking, range checking, not having to have Makefiles, and on and on....)

No, they learned the easy way, they learned Ada first{:-).  As a result, they
can spend more time on concepts.  If you come from concepts and avoid language
hacking, you avoid the pothole, sinkholes, ...

Jack
--
John (Jack) Beidler, Ph.D., Professor of Computer Science
Computing Sciences Department, University of Scranton, Scranton, PA 18510
Mailto:[log in to unmask]     Phone: (717) 941-7774  Fax: (717) 941-4250
http://www.cs.UofS.edu/~beidler

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