Early projects using Ada at the United States Air Force Academy

ABSTRACT

Ada is the language of choice in the computer science curriculum at the Air Force Academy. Its richness, complexity and strong typing are ideal for teaching abstraction, encapsulation and object-oriented programming in the context of good programming practices.Specifically, the Department of Computer Science teaches Ada in its introductory course required of all students at the Academy. Those cadets majoring in computer science then take an additional Ada programming course in the Fall of their sophomore year, followed by a course in programming languages in the Spring semester. It is this third course, Computer Science 359, that gives cadets their first experience programming a problem of significant complexity in Ada, while introducing them to a wide variety of topics and language capabilities.Computer Science 359 has the following goals and objectives:1. Gain a basic understanding of the four programming language paradigms: imperative, object-oriented, functional and logic-oriented.2. Gain a broad knowledge of the Ada programming language.3. Gain a working knowledge of object-oriented programming.4. Gain familiarity with a functional and logic-oriented programming language.5. Gain a working knowledge of recursion.This paper discusses the type and scope of projects that have been used to teach the Ada programming portion of the course.

REFERENCES

• 1: 1 Package developed by Dr. Martin Carlisle, email address: [e-mail].
• 2: Glenn Ricart , Ashok K. Agrawala, An optimal algorithm for mutual exclusion in computer networks, Communications of the ACM, v.24 n.1, p.9-17, Jan. 1981 [doi>10.1145/358527.358537]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.2 Language Classifications

          Nouns: Ada

Additional Classification:
  K. Computing Milieux
  K.3 COMPUTERS AND EDUCATION
  K.6 MANAGEMENT OF COMPUTING AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS

General Terms:
Documentation, Languages