Re: Ada for 1st year students

On Oct 9, 6:06 pm, amado.al...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
Dear Fellow Adaists:

I have been blessed with the oportunity to teach Ada to 1st year
students of a licenciate programme of informatics engineering at
Universidade Lusófona do Porto.

I seek advice from the vast wisdom in this forum, on:

(1) Textbooks. In Portuguese (Brazilian translation fine) or English.
Must be introductory, i.e. for students sans prior knowledge of
programming in any language. Should be small or cheap (or both). The
vendor should be prompt.

(2) Compilers. Must be free (as in free beer) or very low cost
(perhaps an educational license) and install out-of-the box on Windows
or Linux (or both, preferably). Must support Latin-1, preferably
Unicode. The vendor should be prompt.

(3) IDE or text editor. Same requirements as above.

(4) Graphic or GUI library. (I want to be able to produce graphical
output, not just the same old text output on a teletype-like window.)
Same requirements as above, plus: a simple or small API, eventually at
the cost of possibilities (e.g. may be limited to a single window, of
a single fixed size, limited number of colors). Should have some
support for input, e.g. textboxes, buttons, mouse input. Should use a
simple fragment of Ada, viz. excluding OOP. Should support printing,
or exporting to PDF or some such, or clipboard copying onto a "office"
document, or any combination of the above. Support for a picture
format would be a plus (PNG, JPEG...)

I have knowledge, in various degrees, of various items in each
category, but I will not name any at this moment, to avert
prejudice ;-)

Many thanks.

Well, an easy answer to your 2..4 questions is the GNAT solution
with the GPS IDE and GtkAda. I'm sure that it works both with
Linux and Windows, since I work on Linux and my students on
Windows. I never used GtkAda, so I do not know if it suits
your needs. No idea about the book...
.