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From: carroll@s.cs.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Texts on fundamentals of progra
Message-ID: <207600019@s.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 16 Apr 89 23:48:00 GMT
References: <1203@microsoft.UUCP>
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Nf-ID: #R:microsoft.UUCP:1203:s.cs.uiuc.edu:207600019:000:1744
Nf-From: s.cs.uiuc.edu!carroll    Apr 16 18:48:00 1989


/* Written  7:56 pm  Mar 31, 1989 by w-colinp@microsoft.UUCP in s.cs.uiuc.edu:comp.lang.c */
/* ---------- "Re: Texts on fundamentals of progra" ---------- */
It isn't C, and it's pretty heavy going alone, but "The Structure and
Interpretation of Computer Programs", by Abelson & Sussman (the textbook
for the first year CS intro for CS and EE programs at MIT) will teach
almost anyone a hell of a lot.  This goes for rank beginners through
Dennis Ritchie.  The C-Scheme compiler is available from MIT.
/* End of text from s.cs.uiuc.edu:comp.lang.c */

flamage() {
*Blech* I took a class in which we used that book and MIT-scheme, and
it was the worst class I've ever had. Most of my hatred for LISP-like
languages stems from my experiences with those two items. An
associate of mine who is a Scheme-guru told me that "MIT scheme is
the worst implementation there is". It was big, it was slow, and it had
*no* debugging capability (the manual claimed it did, but the messages
would abort after the first few characters, i.e. just enough to see the
generic header but not any useful information).

The book wasn't so bad, but I never found anything in it that wasn't
either trivially obvious, useless, or something any non-novice should
know anyway. My experience with students learning Scheme vs. C is that
as bad as C is, it's not nearly as bad as Scheme. As a high school student
I picked up C in a couple weeks, to the point where I code write code
freely. 3 years after first learning Scheme, I have still not reached
that point.
}

Alan M. Carroll                "And then you say,
carroll@s.cs.uiuc.edu           We have the Moon, so now the Stars..."  - YES
CS Grad / U of Ill @ Urbana    ...{ucbvax,pur-ee,convex}!s.cs.uiuc.edu!carroll