How Would a Hobbyist Learn Ada?

> I learned Apple Basic, Pascal, FORTRAN and then C/C++ and with some
> GUI languages such as Paradox before I got into Ada. At that time
> (around 1995), the Ada resources on the Internet was scarce. I managed
> to get a book by Jogn G. Barnes, "Programming in Ada" and later
> Michael Feldman's 2 books, "Software Construction and Data Structures
> with Ada95" and "Ada95 - Problem Solving and Program Design". Then I
> managed to find John's 2nd book "Programming in Ada95". I would say
> John's books are Ada's bible, apart the ARM.

I'm interested in the book you mention, but I would like some king of
book to Program Design in Ada 2005, is there any?

Sebastien

Sébastien schrieb:

> I'm interested in the book you mention, but I would like some king of
> book to Program Design in Ada 2005, is there any?

http://archive.adaic.com/standards/8.../ratl-TOC.html
has, I think, the spirit of Ada.

This discussion and the related points made in "Access procedure to
pointer" make me wonder how people who are now knowledgeable in Ada
learned the language.

As for me, I learned by reading John English's book cover to cover,
and I (think I) reached expert status by processing lots of bug
reports on GCC; this made me study the fine points of the AARM. I did
all that as a hobbyist (i.e. off hours), but I already had been
programming for 12 years in various languages when I started learning.

How about others? Were you a hobbyist when you learned Ada? Did many
people attend formal training?

--
Ludovic Brenta.

On Tue, 03 Jun 2008 08:02:19 -0400, Ludovic Brenta
<ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org> wrote:

> How about others? Were you a hobbyist when you learned Ada? Did many
> people attend formal training?

I was a grad student, and got hooked up with the program verification
group at my university. The professor was looking for someone to take
over experimentation in implementing Ada tasking from someone else
leaving. I sat down in front of the computer, with a draft RM in hand
(this was 1981), and learned the Pascal subset in a usable way in a few
weeks.

Ludovic Brenta wrote:
>
> How about others? Were you a hobbyist when you learned Ada? Did many
> people attend formal training?

As a new hire at Martin Marietta Denver Aerospace in 1984, I was in a "leper
colony" when an instructor looking for bodies tagged me to attend a short
course. This involved watching videos of Ichbiah, Barnes, and Firth presenting
Ada at the Ada Launch (1980 Dec 10). We also got copies of their slides. This
introduced me to Ada 80.

At the time Pascal was my favorite language. I had read about information hiding
in /Software Tools/, but never understood the concept until I encountered Ada
packages.

I was then chosen to attend a 13-wk, full-time course, "Software Engineering
with Ada", where I learned Ada 83 using the Rolm/Data General Ada compiler.

I learned Ada 95 and the current language on the job.

--
Jeff Carter
"Brave Sir Robin ran away."
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
59

On Tue, 3 Jun 2008 05:02:19 -0700 (PDT), Ludovic Brenta
<ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org> declaimed the following in comp.lang.ada:

>
> How about others? Were you a hobbyist when you learned Ada? Did many
> people attend formal training?

I picked up the blue book [Wegner] in the spring of 1980, in time
for my senior year language design (not so much /how to/, but more of a
survey course). Used it, and a copy of the preliminary
reference/rational for Green, to do my presentation on the language -- I
had it easy; I followed the Algol and Pascal presenters, so could open
with "... as Ada started from a Pascal base, I won't cover what has
already been said about Pascal, but instead expand on the new features
and improvements"

Jan 1981, Lockheed Sunnyvale sent me, and four others, to a four-day
class on Ada in LA.

Unfortunately, I never made it to a project that actually used the
language (and actually grumbled when a real-time group moving from
PDP-11s to VAXes did a comparison study of: remain in assembly; move to
FORTRAN 77; move to C; move to Pascal -- and chose Pascal for realtime!
My comment was: if you're going to go the mile from assembly to Pascal,
you might as well fall onto your face [to get the next 6 feet] and pick
Ada).

NOW, finally, I've been on an Ada assignment for two years -- though
none of the fancy stuff is being used (no tasking, protected objects...
just private records and lots of call p.x so it can call q.y which calls
r.z just to retrieve a value...)

--
Wulfraed Dennis Lee Bieber KD6MOG
wlfraed@ix.netcom.com wulfraed@bestiaria.com
HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/
(Bestiaria Support Staff: web-asst@bestiaria.com)
HTTP://www.bestiaria.com/

Ludovic Brenta ha scritto:

>
> How about others? Were you a hobbyist when you learned Ada? Did many
> people attend formal training?
>

I got curious about Ada (less than 1 year ago) by reading an article
on a
computer magazine. I googled a little bit and found some tutorials.
Succesively, I started using Ada in some medium-complexity
projects (that I already developed in other languages) by keeping
the RM at hand.

Currently I can say that I feel confident with the basic stuff, but I
do
not consider myself an expert (even discarding the part that I just
skimmed
through such as Annex D and E).

More or less the same path was followed by a student of mine when
he started working on his final project with me...

On Tue, 3 Jun 2008 05:02:19 -0700 (PDT), Ludovic Brenta wrote:

> How about others? Were you a hobbyist when you learned Ada? Did many
> people attend formal training?

I learned about Ada in 1984 or so, when I studied at my university. It was
not lessons, rather colloquium where it was shortly introduced. Ada didn't
impressed me. I was young and preferred PL/1. (:-)) Some time later I
gained the great Gehani's book and this changed everything. Already working
in the labs for remote sensing I feverishly searched for an Ada compiler
for RSX-11M, which we used there, with no success.[*] Nevertheless, when I
started my postgraduate work, I was determined to do it in Ada. I wrote
almost 90% of it without a compiler on paper sheets, before my supervisor
found a firm where I could access a VAX-11 clone with glorious DEC Ada
compiler.

----------
* I got some horrific five-passes monster, which took 20 minutes to compile
something like "hello world," and implemented less than a half of the
language. I don't know what it was.

--
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de

Ludovic> How about others? Were you a hobbyist when you learned Ada?
Ludovic> Did many people attend formal training?

I was an hobbyist, and I learned it by reading a draft version of
Ada95 RM in 1994. And I got hooked

Ludovic Brenta wrote:

> How about others? Were you a hobbyist when you learned Ada? Did many
> people attend formal training?

Ada was used for some subjects in the university I attended (RT systems,
concurrent programming). At that time (1994), the language for "Introduction
to programming" was Pascal (nowadays it's Ada).

So I learned what I needed to do the practicals of these subjects, but the core
learning was "at will" by the student, which frankly I don't remember how I
did; probably with the Barnes book and trial-and-error.

Then, I used it for my final project and I'm using it for my PhD in robotics.