Path: utzoo!mnetor!spectrix!yunexus!ists!mike
From: mike@ists (Mike Clarkson)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: First Languages
Message-ID: <155@ists>
Date: 6 Mar 88 06:38:41 GMT
References: <1016@its63b.ed.ac.uk> <2922@pitt.UUCP> <1038@its63b.ed.ac.uk>
Organization: I.S.T.S.
Lines: 26
Keywords: engineering, science, programming.
Summary: FORTRAN and Scheme

Just a couple of really short points I'd like to make:

MIT teaches Scheme (a dialect of Lisp) for its 1'st year engineering course.
If you're not familliar with the book "Structure and Interpretation of
Computer Programs" by Abelson and Sussman (MIT Press), I recommend it very
highly.  It is incredibily beautiful from a computer "Science" point of view,
and intended for scientists and engineers at the same time.  I guess I feel
that these two cultures don't *have* to be polarized, but as someone pointed
out, good luck convincing the first year syllabus director of that...

And secondly, although FORTRAN is abysmal beyond description, people who
have never used it for scientific programming should be aware of a couple
of very simple reasons why C, Pascal etc are not viable alternatives.
1) there is no exponentiation operator defined.  Neither C or Pascal have
an equivalent to the FORTRAN ** operator. I assure you no scientist will
write much  code in a language that doesn't have this - it's too painful.
2) neither C or Pascal handle complex variables.  For work in quantum mechanics
this is important, and it's again too painful to start using records/structures
for this.


-- 
Mike Clarkson						mike@ists.UUCP
Institute for Space and Terrestrial Science
York University, North York, Ontario,
CANADA M3J 1P3						(416) 736-5611