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From: hrubin@pop.stat.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: Teaching Fortran
Message-ID: <8110@mentor.cc.purdue.edu>
Date: 18 Mar 91 13:19:30 GMT
References: <9103131812.AA17727@sun.soe.clarkson.edu>
Sender: news@mentor.cc.purdue.edu
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In article <9103131812.AA17727@sun.soe.clarkson.edu>, taylor@sun.soe.clarkson.edu (Ross Taylor) writes:
> 
> Teaching Fortran to University Students
> ---------------------------------------
> 
> I work at a small university in upstate NY.  Most of the 
> students are engineers of one sort or another.  All eng. 
> students are required to take a first semester course which, 
> among other things, attempts to teach them Fortran.  For a 
> variety of reasons the course fails in that regard.  The 
> students are unable to create even the simplest of programs and 
> get them write (pun intended).
> 
> As a result, we are currently debating the re-structuring of the 
> Fortran course and/or its timing.  I would like to hear from 
> fellow readers of this newsgroup who are involved with education 
> how their institution and/or dept handles any programming 
> requirements.

This problem has been encountered elsewhere.  I suspect that the main
reason the course fails is that those teaching the course are interested
primarily in such aspects of the language as data management, IO, and
formatting.  The first is of essentially no importance to the students
involved, and the last two are of minor importance.  In using programming
to help in mathematics, the input is all in the PROGRAM, not the data,
and the alignment, etc., of the output is not of major importance, and
can usually be copied if neat formatting is required.

On the other hand, the calculation aspects of Fortran, or any other language,
usually considered of minor importance by CS people, are THE important aspect.
One can see the deficiencies of languages by looking at this point, and they
are manifold.  
--
Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907-1399
Phone: (317)494-6054
hrubin@l.cc.purdue.edu (Internet, bitnet)   {purdue,pur-ee}!l.cc!hrubin(UUCP)