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From: robison@uiucdcsb.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Teaching Assembler on VAX (BSD
Message-ID: <170500007@uiucdcsb>
Date: Sun, 7-Jun-87 17:36:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: uiucdcsb.170500007
Posted: Sun Jun  7 17:36:00 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 10-Jun-87 04:29:05 EDT
References: <7401@boring.cwi.nl>
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Nf-From: uiucdcsb.cs.uiuc.edu!robison    Jun  7 16:36:00 1987


> ...Utah teaches functional programming
> with Lisp, Scheme, and Miranda in several undergrad courses, but nevertheless
> all we seem to produce are C hackers.

Is this so bad?  I would hope the exposure to the declarative languages 
would at least improve the C hackers' style.  I first learned FORTRAN 
in high school and wrote spaghetti-code.  After learning ALGOL, I had 
to go back to FORTRAN, but at least I could write structured control-flow 
with gotos.  Likewise, learning Pascal helped me think in terms of data 
structures, even if they had to be implemented as FORTRAN arrays.

Learning declarative languages should help C hackers:

	1) Distinguish definition from implementation.  
	2) Keep variables as local as possible.  
	3) Use parameters instead of global side-effects to pass information.

I believe a dose of object-oriented programming (e.g. Smalltalk) also 
improves the C hacker's style.  (Note that this is the hacker's version of
the old "learn Latin to improve your English" argument.)

Arch D. Robison
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
	
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