🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <5595@ficc.uu.net> peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
>In article <6205@hubcap.clemson.edu>, billwolf%hazel.cs.clemson.edu@hubcap.clemson.edu (William Thomas Wolfe,2847,) writes:
>>     OK; let's imagine.  Student gets syntax error.  [...] Student
>>     shows the program to the local Consultant [who] points out
>>     the obvious error.
>
>Ever been a consultant at a university comp center? I have. The next
>stage, if the student is working in Fortran, C, or some other production
>language (ADA wasn't around back then), is...

I currently am a consultant in a CS lab situation..

>      Student comes back in 10 minutes with the same error.
>or...
>      Consultant spends 10 minutes explaining error to student, and
>      maybe fails. Meanwhile 6 other students get tired of waiting...

except that 4 of those 6 students are having the same problem, so your
5-10 minute explanation isn't going to just one person, if you understand
what everyone else is gong through.

>If the student is programming in Pascal, they are much more likely to
>understand the error.

I disagree there.  Obvious syntax errors are obvious syntax errors.  Ada
is better for students, because many problems I encounter are people who
cannot quite remember when to use 'var' in a paramater declaration.  'in'
and 'out' are very obvious.

>ADA is considerably more complex than Fortran or C.

and any course which introduces a language doesn't make full use of that
language.  ever see an intro to c course that make use of doubly linked
lists of pointers to function which return a pointer to another function?
I haven't?  But I've used such twisted arrangements.  

My first HLL was pascal, and most of my programming has been done in pascal.
I was thrust into doing an ada assignment, and I did the whole thing in about
three hours, without any problems at all.  

I'd much rather have to deal with students learning Ada than students learning
Pascal.  It just seems a little less arbitrary to beginners, unlike most
of the Pascal I/O support.

>-- 
>Peter da Silva, Xenix Support, Ferranti International Controls Corporation.
>Business: peter@ficc.uu.net, +1 713 274 5180. | "The sentence I am now
>Personal: peter@sugar.hackercorp.com.   `-_-' |  writing is the sentence
>Quote: Have you hugged your wolf today?  'U`  |  you are now reading"


David D "Zoo" Zuhn //    University of Minnesota      \\ Twin Cities
          Computer Science Systems Consultant, EE/CS 4-204
zuhn@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu,    zuhn@umn-cs.UUCP,   ..rutgers!umn-cs!zuhn