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From: ann@decwrl.DEC.COM (Ann Mei Chang)
Newsgroups: soc.college,comp.edu
Subject: Re: First Language Taught in CSC degree track
Message-ID: <11152@decwrl.DEC.COM>
Date: Thu, 30-Jul-87 13:00:34 EDT
Article-I.D.: decwrl.11152
Posted: Thu Jul 30 13:00:34 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 1-Aug-87 10:03:30 EDT
References: <1472@super.upenn.edu.upenn.edu> <3263@ncoast.UUCP>
Reply-To: ann@decwrl.UUCP (Ann Mei Chang)
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation
Lines: 28
Keywords: language, CS 106 track, intro
Summary: Why Ada?
Xref: mnetor soc.college:792 comp.edu:535

After talking to some people at work about the relative virtues of 
Ada, Pascal, and Modula-2 as an intro programming language, I have become
more convinced that Stanford has made a reasonable choice in selecting
Ada as its intro language.

From what I gather, Ada contains all the "good" features that one would
look for in a structured programming language.  Of course, it contains many
other more complex/confusing features, but these would be most likely
avoided and discouraged in an intro course.  The major advantage both Ada
and Modula-2 have over Pascal is the concept of modules.  Ada may also
be considered a more reasonable language to teach than Modula-2 because
it is well supported, and much "real" work has been done on it.  One
problem I think the department was worried about with Modula-2 was that
they weren't sure if they could get a good compiler.  I believe that Ada
compilers are easy to come by, and the army will even give it to colleges 
for free.

I guess my conclusion is that Ada is at least a reasonable choice for an
intro language, provided that certain features are avoided.  In addition,
it is a reasonable language to use in some later classes for covering
such issues as concurrent programming (for which Stanford has used Ada and
C this past year).

By the way, CS majors at Stanford are also exposed to and write programs
in a number of languages other than the "intro" language.  Although a single
language, Pascal in the past, is often chosen for large projects, the
core sequence for CS majors includes work in Lisp, Prolog, C, assembly
language, and possibly others to a lesser degree.