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From: ditolla@itnsg1.cineca.it (Francesco Di Tolla)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Teaching C as first programming language
Message-ID: <1991Jun19.172436.14898@itnsg1.cineca.it>
Date: 19 Jun 91 17:24:36 GMT
References: <44506@netnews.upenn.edu>
Distribution: world,comp
Organization: Laboratorio di Fisica Computazionale, INFM. Trento Italia
Lines: 19

It's good!
If the first language you learn is hard, then you 'll learn other
languages in a short time;
if you learn C or Pascal, you'll be able to read programs written
in Fortran or Basic.
C is a bit harder then Pascal..., so the student also in other 
laguages 'll program better then if hi started with the other.
Force them to write subroutines also for tasks for which they
already exists (ex. strcpy.....).
As reference manual the K.R. is good but slow, it explains
must important features only after a long introduction, so
the student 'll have problems in understanding things like
'visibility' and 'lifetime' of variables, or the utility of
pointers..., very good from this point of view are the original
manuals of Microsoft C (I learned much more on them, in the version
4.0).
In a first course I won't talk about object oriented programming.
Don't make applications to graphics, they are not standard 
F.