Data Structures being taught in Ada
Posted by AAMGR@reddit | learnprogramming | View on Reddit | 8 comments
I've recently learned that DSA in my uni is being taught in Ada. I've never heard of it up until now. Apparently it's mostly used in the dod/military. Anyways, how common is it for DSA to be taught in Ada? From my research it's usually taught in C, Java or Python. For programming fundamentals class which is a requirement before taking DSA, you had a choice of Java or C, so I assumed DSA will also be taught in either of those but I guess not. A lot of upperclassmen were caught out by this, DSA is already a hard class but then you have to learn a new language at the same time. I'm taking DSA next semester so at least I have the whole of summer to prepare.
kbielefe@reddit
My DSA class was in C, but honestly I would have preferred Ada. With DSA in C, you end up spending more time teaching yourself to debug segmentation faults and buffer overflows than actually learning DSA. Ada is very similar to C, but its type system makes those sorts of bugs less likely, which is why people liked it for safety critical systems.
ILikeLiftingMachines@reddit
Ignoring for a moment the C-family vs. Algol family history, Ada and C really are miles apart in how much they trust the programmer... which, in fairness, you alude to. Now, I'm biased. I started out in Pascal/Delphi/Ada and C always seemed like anarchy and pointers seemed evil. To me, they seem like chalk and cheese.
OTOH, maybe they are close in a world where fortran and brainfuck exist :)
kbielefe@reddit
I mostly meant as in procedural, relatively low-level, and imperative. I think someone who knows C would have less difficulty picking up Ada than many other languages, although the reverse isn't necessarily true.
micronian2@reddit
Someone already provided a link to the excellent learn.adacore.com site. That site also has the “Ada for the C++ and Java Developer” document https://learn.adacore.com/courses/Ada_For_The_CPP_Java_Developer/index.html
Ada’s type system makes it possible to specify domain details more easily compared to some other languages.
Feel free to ask for help in the Ada subreddit group.
peterlinddk@reddit
That is very uncommon - but actually a good idea! There are thousands of DSA tutorials with full source-code in Python, Java, and C, so a lot of students cheat themselves, and copy existing code, rather than implementing the data structures and algorithms from the theory they are learning.
And ADA is a nice language, it is easy enough to transfer your knowledge from other languages and use it for "simple" data manipulation. I had an parallel programming class back in the day where we used Ada, without having learned it first, and it didn't require more effort to understand the language than the advanced theory, so I applaud the choice.
DSA shouldn't be about programming, or understanding the programming language, but the abstract structures - so don't worry about the language!
FanAccomplished2399@reddit
Never even heard of ada.
rabuf@reddit
This is not true, this was true 3 decades ago, but in DOD it's not very common at all anymore. It's used more often in avionics and safety critical systems.
It's a mostly straightforward language. Here are some resources:
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming
https://learn.adacore.com
https://www.adaic.org/learn/materials/
strcspn@reddit
Not very common. I would start looking up the syntax and basics of the language.