[SPAM] - [GAP] E701-009: New contribution (Teaching Ada by Examples) - Email found in subject

[Ted Baker]

That description embarasses me by sounding grander than reality.
The collection of Ada programming examples is just started, as we
are only 2.5 weeks into the term.  I will be adding bits and
pieces as the term goes along.  This course is not primarily about
Ada programming, but I get to choose the language the assignments
are done in, and took this as an opportunity to force a few
students to at least "taste" the Ada language.  

It is too early to tell whether there will be a backlash.  A few
students seem interest enough to ask questions.  Others are
sitting back and listening.  It is hard to tell how much they are
learning so far.  The first Ada programming assignment is not due
until next week.  That is a very small one.  The one other time I
did something like this (in the Ada 83 days) a backlash came near
the last program, which was to extend (e.g., add function
parameters with full funarg-like closures) to a tiny translator and
interpreter for a Pascal/Ada-like language.  This time I'm hoping
to reduce the backlash by having them work on a tiny (pure
functional, no setq or prog) LISP interpreter, which will require
them to read and understand less code, due the simpler nature of
the language.

--Ted

On Wed, Sep 14, 2005 at 01:04:36PM -0400, Javier Miranda wrote:
> Dear GAP Member,
> 
>    I am glad to announce a new contribution submitted by Ted Baker.
> Here you have copy of its description (this is now also available
> in the "Teaching Materials" section of our GAP Contributions Page).
> 
> Waiting for your contribution,
> 
> --- Javier Miranda
> 
> 
> 
> Teaching Ada by Examples
> ------------------------
> 
> Prof. Ted Baker teaches Ada as one of the parts of a general
> programming languages course. He found that running through a
> catalog of Ada features in class would take too much time, so he
>  decided to try teaching Ada by examples, introducing various Ada
> language features in the examples that he uses for illustration of    
> language implementation concepts (so far, mainly scanning and
> recursive descent parsing). For example he uses exception handling   
> for error recovery, and explains how Ada does it as he walks through
> the code of the parser. In addition he starts with fully qualified
> names, and then introduce renaming declarations in the examples to
> shorten the code to fit better on the web pages.
> 
> This web server provides his collection of examples but also some
> introductory material to the Ada language (documents originally
> writen by Robert Dewar and Ed Schonberg and slightly extended by
> Ted Baker).
> 
>   Author: Ted Baker
> Keywords: Programming languages, Ada; examples
>     http://www.cs.fsu.edu/~baker/ada/
> 
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