Oolite Bulletins

Even I've heard of Ada..... and my last programming language was.... Turbo Pascal 6.0 for DOS!

I also had an opportunity to hate Ada at uni. However, as I’ve grown older and wiser and seen the horrible flaws of C’s laxness, I want more bondage and discipline in my life (oo-er). Maybe I’d like it more now.

(My most recent example of those horrible flaws was in a fairly major open source app, where I came across code like “int foo_result = foo(); if (foo < 0) …”. Now, there may be a time and place where checking the sign of a function’s address is useful, but what’s wrong with requiring an explicit cast in that case?)

Oo-er

@Cmdr M: see here (not that I condone wikipedia as an actual source of credible info - however in this case I'm aware enough to agree with most of it): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_%28pro ... anguage%29

I also did Smalltalk at Uni (1990-94) which was my first encounter with OO and it was better implemented in Smalltalk than it was in C++ (which was just taking off when I left uni)

[JohnnyBoy notices how the other members completely ignore the mere mention of Turbo Pascal, and he resolves never to mention it again in 'polite company'...]

JohnnyBoy wrote:

[JohnnyBoy notices how the other members completely ignore the mere mention of Turbo Pascal, and he resolves never to mention it again in 'polite company'...]

/me strokes JohnnyBoy's ego

There, there... I learnt TP when I was in high school, and see where it got me...

@JB - we were being polite... Don't think I ever did Turbo Pascal but I remember doing Pascal programs (was it Pascal...?) on the BBC B at school.

Nothing has really been the same for me since my peeking and poking (oo-er) days of C64 basic...

The first ever program I wrote for the MOD I knocked up in QBasic! Because they'd given me a 16MHz 386 with 16MB RAM - Windows 3.11 and 2x 90MB removable Bernoulli drives* and nothing else would work on it that I had access to - and as QBasic was pretty much the same as AmigaBasic I thought I'd just get on with it.

*This was 1995 by the way - so we were into early Pentiums at this point.

DaddyHoggy wrote:

also did Smalltalk at Uni (1990-94) which was my first encounter with OO and it was better implemented in Smalltalk than it was in C++ (which was just taking off when I left uni)

Pimp: Objective-C uses a Smalltalk-like object model, not a C++-like decorated struct model. ;-)

I’ve done Turbo Pascal and QBasic too. Can’t remember much about either. I think I implemented Minesweeper in TP, and a rock-dodging game in QBasic (very popular at school).

DaddyHoggy wrote:

@JB - we were being polite... Don't think I ever did Turbo Pascal but I remember doing Pascal programs (was it Pascal...?) on the BBC B at school.

I also dabbled with Pascal at school (and Loco, Basic etc.), but all I learned from the experience was that it was just like what it sounded like (paska is the Finnish word for s**t).

Ahruman wrote:

I also had an opportunity to hate Ada at uni. However, as I’ve grown older and wiser and seen the horrible flaws of C’s laxness, I want more bondage and discipline in my life (oo-er). Maybe I’d like it more now.

I've seen that a lot: people see Ada in their early days and hate it, but then when they get a few hundred thousand lines of code behind them, they start to understand why it's the way it is. It's certainly not for everybody.

Anyway, you and anybody else who's curious about Ada are invited to drop by the #ada channel on the Freenode IRC network. I'll be sure to make you welcome.

There's also a "macada" mailing list out there; some of its members used to stop by #ada, but I haven't seen them in a while. From the way they talked it was a small but very active community.

Aw, thanks guys. I don't feel so embarrassed about my 'shameful' programming past...

I think my most adventurous project involved writing a TP prog that asked for the dimensions of one of a series of electric motors that I had to draw. The prog then output an AutoLisp file to disk which I then executed on AutoCad to draw the motor.

Looking back, I think that it would have been quicker if I'd just drawn the damn things in AutoCad myself...

Wolfwood wrote:

(paska is the Finnish word for s**t).

Hey Wolfwood, in the United States, "TP" is the usual abbreviation for toilet paper. I bet a whole load of C coders got a laugh out of that one.