Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site ncsu.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!bonnie!akgua!mcnc!ncsu!mauney From: mauney@ncsu.UUCP (Jon Mauney) Newsgroups: net.cse Subject: Re: students editing output Message-ID: <2944@ncsu.UUCP> Date: Mon, 30-Sep-85 17:03:19 EDT Article-I.D.: ncsu.2944 Posted: Mon Sep 30 17:03:19 1985 Date-Received: Thu, 3-Oct-85 03:43:11 EDT References: <685@bu-cs.UUCP> Organization: N.C. State University, Raleigh Lines: 33 >> From: laura@l5.uucp (Laura Creighton) >> ... and I wonder why every third c program >> I see is written by someone who thought that he had to reinvent ... > From: root@bu-cs.UUCP (Barry Shein) > Good point, but *I* claim the problem is the insistence on teaching > with Pascal. Your example provides an excellent example of why: > ... [example of how it is hard to write generic procedures > in Pascal (with at least 3 syntax errors :-) ] ... > The result: Everything ends up to be ad hoc one-shots, forget building > generic libraries, write your own everything. And completely forget > portability, it doesn't exist in the pascal world. A) Occasionally I feel the need to point out that although Pascal is far from ideal, it is quite possible to write large programs with separate compilation while maintaining reasonable portability, that C pretends to provide strings but really doesn't, and that portability is a major problem for C code as well as Pascal code. But the interminable argument between C and Pascal is not the point. The point is ... B) I do not believe that the problem is due to the (very real) defects in Pascal, but to the way programming is taught. I first learned FORTRAN, then PL/I, and much later Pascal. Both FORTRAN and PL/I allow external units and libraries and conformant array parameters, and PL/I has untyped pointers. But we only wrote ad hoc one-shots, never generic routines nor did we reuse other code. Pascal courses could teach re-use of code, perhaps at the source level, but they don't. The problem is the syllabus, not the language. -- Jon Mauney, mcnc!ncsu!mauney North Carolina State University Brought to you by Super Global Mega Corp .com