Teaching data structures with Ada
Michael B. Feldman · ACM SIGCSE Bulletin · 1990
This paper discusses our eight years of experience in teaching a data structures course using Ada a s the primary programming language .The recent history of the course is summarized, emphasizin g the transition to Ada .Language-to-language comparisons of several particularly attractive Ad a features are given . THE RECENT HISTORY OF CSci 15 9CSci 159, Programming and Data Strucrures,is an undergraduate course in the Georg e Washington University Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, required fo r undergraduate majors in computer science and computer engineering .The course is also populate d by would-be graduate computer science majors who have a weak background in modern dat a structures, and by graduate students from other fields .Typical enrollment is in the neighborhoo d of 100-150 students per year .The author has been teaching this course and others like it since 1975 .The primary language use d was Fortran in 1975 ; transitions were made to PL/1 (1978( ), Pascal (1980) ) and finally Ada in 1985 .Recent primary textbooks have been those of Horowitz and Sahni [Horowitz77], Tenenbaum an d Augenstein [Tenenbaum8l ], Aho, Hoperoft and Ullman [Aho83], and finally this author's ow n text [Feldman85] .At the risk of appearing to "plug" the book, we refer to it as Feldman in the sequel .