Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!pacbell!ames!ncar!gatech!hubcap!billwolf%hazel.cs.clemson.edu
From: billwolf%hazel.cs.clemson.edu@hubcap.clemson.edu (William Thomas Wolfe,2847,)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Which language to teach first?
Message-ID: <6204@hubcap.clemson.edu>
Date: 7 Aug 89 21:18:04 GMT
References: <2552@aplcen.apl.jhu.edu>
Sender: news@hubcap.clemson.edu
Reply-To: billwolf%hazel.cs.clemson.edu@hubcap.clemson.edu
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From by genesch@aplvax.jhuapl.edu (Eugene Schwartzman):
># it's a lot easier for the student to accept a deferred explanation 
># of generics than it is to switch languages entirely  [...] Ada 
># provides lots of room for the highly motivated student to
># read ahead and go beyond what the class is doing; Pascal can
># provide nothing more than severe frustration.   
> 
> Totally disagree!!!!  You obviously have not worked with Pascal too much.

   On the contrary, Pascal was my first language; I used it for
   three extremely frustrating years.
    
> 1) I have worked with it for a long time, and the frustration level I 
>    encountered didn't even come close to the one I met when I started working
>    with Ada.

   What a joke... how do you handle abstraction without packages?
   How do you separate specification from implementation?  How do
   you enforce the security of an ADT without limited private types?
   How do you manage exception handling?  What do you do when you get
   sick and tired of not being able to express concurrency?  What about
   the joy of writing code to manipulate a linked list for the 348th time
   because you can't express it cleanly, once and for all, using generics?

   Pascal may not be the ultimate in frustration, but it's WAY up there;
   Ada, on the other hand, is the language I wish I had been started off
   with in the first place.  I wouldn't wish Pascal on anyone, except
   possibly a very hard-core masochist.  


   Bill Wolfe, wtwolfe@hubcap.clemson.edu