Curricula (was: Assembly vs. Everything Else

I've been told that LISP stands for Lots of Insane Stupid Parentheses. But could any language have punctuation more demented than C?

> OTOH, I also thought that it (and the teacher) encouraged some very

Encouraged? Some of the teachers won't let their students do a program to count to 10 WITHOUT recursion! They can't imagine doing something like Fibonacci sequence WITHOUT using recursion. How can you do a non-trivial program with recursion without stack overflow? > But C at arrival? Well, if there are preparation courses, I can see why.

> are a lot of people who have been using and programming computers since they > were kids, and they have an initial advantage over the newcomers. So as not

> bore the already-experienced, I can see why the real courses should start

NOPE. NO preparatory course, nor stated prerequisite! It's worse than that. The profs doing the intro course have decided on Scheme, but the ones teaching the next course (Data Structures and Algorithms teach that class using C. When challenged as to the inconsistency, their response was, "well, they should already know how to program in C before they get here." When you have a prof who writes "puzzle code", like Alan Holub, undergrads are expected to follow stuff like while(*T++=*S++); with NO formal preparation. But the program there is over-enrolled. Their approach to that is to progressively keep increasing the volume of homework until there are enough breakdowns to get the enrollment down. I call that sadistic. They call that "social Darwinism". If it were so, then they are breeding for STAMINA, not computer science skill. If it were to live up to its claims of portability, if it were to survive MICROS~1's perversions of it, and if they would give me POINTERS (OK, intrinsically non-portable), then it could be a reasonable approach. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com www.merritt.edu/~fcisin