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From: jack@cwi.nl (Jack Jansen)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions,comp.edu,comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Teaching Assembler on VAX (BSD 4.3)
Message-ID: <7401@boring.cwi.nl>
Date: Sun, 31-May-87 06:06:39 EDT
Article-I.D.: boring.7401
Posted: Sun May 31 06:06:39 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 2-Jun-87 01:27:44 EDT
References: <351@aucs.UUCP> <588@maccs.UUCP> <234@brandx.rutgers.edu> <2794@felix.UUCP> <786@edge.UUCP>
Reply-To: jack@boring.UUCP (Jack Jansen)
Organization: AMOEBA project, CWI, Amsterdam
Lines: 32
Xref: mnetor comp.unix.questions:2619 comp.edu:424 comp.lang.misc:423

In article <786@edge.UUCP> doug@edge.UUCP (Doug Pardee) writes:
>What gets my goat is the notion of teaching CS students that nothing exists
>in the computer world except C programming in *nix.  You don't necessarily
>have to teach them assembler (or any other language), but they should be
>taught that there are lots of computer languages including assembler, and
>how to tell which language is appropriate for a given application.

The point I (and a lot of others) tried to make is that you should
*not* use assembler for an introduction course. The original posting
gave the impression that the author wanted to use assembler to
teach programming in general.

This should not be done in assembler, but in some higher level
language like Pascal or M2 (or, given unix, perhaps in C).

As soon as students know about trees, hashtables and all that stuff,
*then* you could start teaching assembler.

This doesn't have to be a very extensive course, though.
You should be able to assume that the students already know how to
solve the problems presented, and the only thing they still have to
is learn assembler (i.e. learn that, on every computer, there
is a funny, all-powerful language, that can do everything, albeit
rather difficult to use).

Features that were asked for in the original (predefined macros,
unified add instructions) are *bad* for this. They obscure the
actual machine, which is exactly what you *don't* want in
assembler.
-- 
	Jack Jansen, jack@cwi.nl (or jack@mcvax.uucp)
	The shell is my oyster.