teaching programming to beginners

On 3 Jan 2012 at 11:42, Fred Cisin wrote: Most of the web seems to be database and graphics. Not much explicit math there at all (of course, there's a lot of math going on behind the scene in graphics, but few programmers ever get to see that). There were variants that used ASCII di-and-trigraphs to represent the special characters, but they made the nearly unreadable almost totally unreadable. In general, most "standard" computer character sets are not well thought out. Algol suffered from similar issues. Yes, you had substitutions, but I think they impaired readability. The original 6-bit CDC Display Code set had many Algol characters, but that meant that others had to be dropped, such as quotation marks (both double and single) and question and exclamation marks, among others: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_display_code The colon was a horrible problem, being code 00, where 0000 in the low-order 12 bits of a word signified an end-of-line. Two colons in the wrong place in a line would end the line and elide both colons. Most print trains only had a single colon, so printing slowed down when there were too many of them. I seem to remember that a similar problem existed for character code 00 on even-parity 7-track mag tape. --Chuck