Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!pasteur!fir.Berkeley.EDU!faustus
From: faustus@fir.Berkeley.EDU (Wayne A. Christopher)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: Which language to teach first?
Message-ID: <16198@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 10 Aug 89 23:43:07 GMT
References: <8514@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> <13158@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <6454@pdn.paradyne.com> <1095@kuling.UUCP>
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Reply-To: faustus@fir.Berkeley.EDU (Wayne A. Christopher)
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In article <1095@kuling.UUCP> mattias@emil (Mattias Waldau) writes:
> ... The difference between clean programming in Lisp
> and Pascal is just syntax, the approach to solve a programming task is
> the same.

I really have to disagree with this.  Thinking in a declarative language
such as Prolog is quite different from thinking in a procedural language.
In Prolog, you are encouraged to write down assertions about the problem,
and operations that are very basic to procedural programming, such as
modifying the value of an object, are seldom needed and extremely awkward
when they are needed.  Probably it is easier to become good with Prolog if
you haven't learned a procedural language first, and perhaps vice-versa.

	Wayne