At least two!

At Aston we teach Ada as a first language (for much the same reasons as
Jim Briggs gave).  In fact we have just rejected a plan to switch to
Java for CS1 and so Ada will continue to be used for the next 3 or 4
years at least.  Currently we teach C++ and Eiffel in later years but
feel we ought to fit Java in somewhere.

If/when Aston merges with Birmingham Univ. (who teach Java as their
first language) we will be pushing to retain Ada!

Dr. Alan Barnes
Computer Science            Telephone: +44 121 359 3611 Ext. 4663
Aston University            E-Mail:  [log in to unmask]
Aston Triangle              Fax:     +44 121 333 6215
Birmingham B4 7ET           WWW:     http://www.cs.aston.ac.uk/~barnesa
U. K.


Jim Briggs wrote:
>
> At 10:51 30/01/01, Ian Sommerville wrote:
> >Ada has not had the impact which I and many others anticipated and is
> >now primarily used for defence and aerospace systems. Few
> >universities now teach Ada as a first language (I think the last Uk
> >university changed from Ada to Java this year) so few students
> >actually understand it.
>
> Ian,
>
> Not true, there is still at least one that hasn't changed to Java!
>
> Here at Portsmouth we still teach Ada as the first language to a wide range
> of students on our computer science, software engineering and information
> technology courses. We believe it is the best language to support the
> teaching of the foundations of programming, especially modularity,
> readability and correctness. We use GNAT because it gives students better
> help with error messages than any other compiler we've seen.
>
> We also believe Ada provides an excellent platform from which to go on to
> teach Java, which we do in the second year for CS and SE students. That was
> a change this year (we used to teach C++) and seems to have gone well.
>
> We've tried this year teaching Java as the first language for our MSc
> conversion course students (again replacing C++). That hasn't been a great
> success but , to be fair, perhaps for reasons nothing to do with choice of
> language.
>
> Regards,
>
> Jim Briggs.
>
> Dr Jim Briggs
> Department of Information Systems, University of Portsmouth
> Burnaby Terrace, 1 Burnaby Road, Portsmouth, PO1 3AE, UK
> Tel: +44 (23) 9284 6438 Fax: +44 (23) 9284 6402