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From: cheung@mathcs.emory.edu (Shun Yan Cheung)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: Language Use
Keywords: C,Ada,Pascal,C++,Other?
Message-ID: <7184@emory.mathcs.emory.edu>
Date: 17 Mar 91 07:01:54 GMT
References: <1150@ra.MsState.Edu>
Organization: Emory University, Dept of Math and CS
Lines: 40

In article <1150@ra.MsState.Edu> thr1@ra.MsState.Edu (Thomas Ritter) writes:
>Hello,
>
>	I've been hearing some discussion in our department about changing
>our primary language from Pascal to something else.
>
>I don't want to start the Ada vs C vs "other" argument.... 
>
>	I would like to hear what people consider important in making a
>decision. ( Usefulness in the real world, teaching ease, programming
>environment... etc.)

I feel the language is the least important in teaching programming,
rather, concentrate on the programming methodology. The programming
language is just a tool. A good carpenter will work magic with any tool.
Didactically, I see no reason what so ever to favor either Pascal or 
C when the objective is to teach student programming. The concept of 
an assignment, procedure etc is the same. If the student masters 
the concepts, he will have not problems learning another language 
in a few days. Personally however, as a teaching tool, I prefer Pascal 
over C because the typing is stronger (I am comparing the old style C, 
I have no idea if ANSI C is strongly typed.) Certainly I will reject 
Fortran (no recursion), even though it is widely used by engineers. 
On the other hand, if you are teaching programming to engineers 
(non majors), you may want to consider Fortran for the sake of 
familiarity. If you want to based your choice on practicality
measured by the number of programs written in a certain language,
I think Cobol is still the number one language. Surely you don't
want to use Cobol....

>
>I would also like to find out what some other schools are doing.

At Emory, the non majors get Pascal and the majors gets C
because the higher level courses all use C.
-- 
Shun Yan Cheung     |  cheung@mathcs.emory.edu                  Internet
Emory University    |  cheung@emory.bitnet			BITNET
Dept of Math and CS |  Voice: (404) 727-3823
Atlanta, GA 30322   |  Engineering: make it work. Research: make it work BETTER