Ada experience in the undergraduate curriculum

of the Ada language as used in computing curricula, with particular reference to undergraduate computing programs. The main points discussed in this article are: * Use of Ada in the universities and colleges is growing slowly but mono-tonically. Perhaps 10% of academic institutions teach Ada in at least one course of some kind. • We have identified 48 institutions in which Ada is introduced as the language of the first course, and 31 more in which Ada is introduced in the second or third course, still early enough to propagate through the upper-level curriculum. These numbers have grown slowly each year for the last 10 years. • Of the institutions using Ada as an important language in their programs , most can be considered teaching rather than research institutions, and most have no particular ties to the federal government.. Of the institutions that have attempted Ada recently at the introductory level, we are aware of only one (a two-year college), that gave it up for another language. In schools that give Ada a serious attempt, teachers and students generally react favorably and tend to stay with it. * Fourteen textbooks are currently available that use Ada as their language of discourse and are oriented to specific undergraduate courses. Six of these are suitable for use in a CSl-level introductory course with no programming prerequisites. Sev-in the Curriculum l)letion. • Of the more than 250 Ada compilers holding government-based validations , most are still rather expensive , even after typical academic discounts. However, enough affordable systems are available for typical academic computing platforms to enable institutions to license them for fees well within their budgets. • With the recent release of New York University's Ada/Ed for free distribution, it is now feasible for teachers to distribute, at no cost to their employers or their students, a quite robust personal Ada system that appears to be adequate for any reasonable introductory course sequence. A compiler to be included in the Free Software Foundation distribution is under development at New York University with Ada 9X Project funding; release is planned for 1993. The remainder of this article is organized in four sections: Institutions in which Ada is taught; Ada-related textbooks suitable for undergraduate courses; Ada compilers on the campus ; and First-person profiles of institutions in which Ada is important. During the summer and fall of 1991, the Ada Information Clearinghouse (AdaIC), operated …