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Tue, 30 Jan 2001 17:04:33 -0600
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This data is dated Spring 2000:
http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~mfeldman/ada-foundation.html .  It lists 19 U.K
Universities that use Ada in Computer Science programs.

With one exception, I haven't heard of any recent  books, aside from Ada
textbooks, which use Ada as an example language (i.e. no "Numerical Recipes
in Ada") .  At one point there was a compiler textbook that used Ada as
well as a few data structure books, among others.  The recent exception is
Michael Scott's excellent "Programming Language Pragmatics" published by
Morgan Kaufmann last summer.  It gives Ada at least as much attention as
C++, Java, Eiffel, and several other languages.  See
http://www.mkp.com/books_catalog/catalog.asp?ISBN=1-55860-442-1

Perhaps a relevant paper is "Bandwagons Considered Harmful" at
http://www.acm.org/sigs/sigada/education/pages/bandwagon.html .  I can
understand switching from Ada to Java if you believe it will help sell more
books.  The reality is it probably will.  However it you truly believe that
Ada is a better language it would be good for you to say so in the preface
or epilogue. It might help start an Ada bandwagon :-).

Regards
Britt Snodgrass

(P.S. if this reply seems strangly formatted, it is because it was composed
and sent with Lotus Notes)






Ian Sommerville <[log in to unmask]>@ACM.ORG> on 01/30/2001 03:47:11 PM

Please respond to Ian Sommerville <[log in to unmask]>

Sent by:  "Team Ada: Ada Advocacy Issues (83 & 95)" <[log in to unmask]>


To:   [log in to unmask]
cc:

Subject:  Re: SE-book 6.ed


At 6:28 pm +0100 30/1/01, Pascal Obry wrote:
>Ian Sommerville writes:
>  > Ada has not had the impact which I and many others anticipated and is
>  > now primarily used for defence and aerospace systems. Few
>
>That is plain wrong. Please have a look at the lastest stats !

Where do I find these? I don't know of anyone outside the defence
industry in the UK using Ada (of course, there probably are some
peopleI haven't heard of but for sure not many)

>
>  > Personally, I think that Ada is a better language than java for
>  > software engineering but the academic and commercial markets do not
>  > agree. I have to be realistic about this and make changes that are
>  > aimed at the majority of users. I would be surprised if you found any
>  > new texts that used Ada.
>
>I would be very surprised to not found texts using Ada !
>
I haven't seen any apart from specialised Ada textbooks (but of
course that doesn't mean they don't exist)

Thanks for your comments

Ian

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Professor Ian Sommerville                       Phone: +44-1524 593795
Computing Dept.,                                Fax: +44-1524 593608
Lancaster University,                           E-mail: [log in to unmask]
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