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From: debray@arizona.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.edu,comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Teaching Assembler
Message-ID: <1748@megaron.arizona.edu>
Date: Wed, 3-Jun-87 11:53:04 EDT
Article-I.D.: megaron.1748
Posted: Wed Jun  3 11:53:04 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 6-Jun-87 04:04:50 EDT
References: <7401@boring.cwi.nl> <2046@a.cs.okstate.edu>
Organization: U of Arizona CS Dept, Tucson
Lines: 32
Xref: utgpu comp.edu:376 comp.lang.misc:420
Summary: CS education

My impression, from many of the responses I've seen on this issue, is that
a person with a CS degree isn't expected to do anything other than
programming.  So why bother with four-year degree programs that require
students to wade through irrelevant-to-the-"real"-world courses like automata
theory and complexity theory, anyway?  Maybe they need to know nothing more
than Cobol, Fortran and C, which any reasonable two-year college could give?

I'm astounded at the number of CS (graduate!) students who're so hidebound
by their BASIC heritage that they can't write a recursive program to save
their lives, and who're so conditioned to think in terms of destructive
assignment that any mention of declarative or applicative programming only
evokes slack-jawed stares.  I find this frustrating at best, terrifying at
worst.

gregg@a.cs.okstate.edu writes:
> More than anything else, it [thinking at the assembly language level]
> has caused me to be extremely conscience about the execution time of
> all the code that I write.  I know that each line of code is not just
> magic, but rather one or more machine instructions that take TIME to
> execute.

I think a more productive approach would be to (a) spend more time
designing the algorithms and data structures (a bubble sort, even if
microcoded, can only do so well!); (b) code the program in a high level
language to reduce the development time; and (c) use the time you've
managed to save in this way to profiling your program and recoding hot
spots in assembler if necessary.
-- 
Saumya Debray		CS Department, University of Arizona, Tucson

     internet:   debray@arizona.edu
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