3 Jan
2012
3 Jan
'12
5:22 a.m.
On 2 Jan 2012 at 21:11, Toby Thain wrote:
Well, there is the "small" problem that
BASIC syntax, data types, and
control structures relate poorly to modern languages and even less to
powerful abstractions. There's not such a huge distance between
Fortran and BASIC!
Oh? Well, it depends what version of FORTRAN (but not Fortran, if
you see where I'm going). Start with USA BASIC FORTRAN subset of
FORTRAN 66 (X3-10.1966). It was standard (FORTRAN was one of the
only ANSI-standard languages before about 1974). Stripped down
FORTRAN to the bare metal. Fewer statment bytes than BASIC.
A good start; it's where many engineers learned to program.
Before that, starting with machine language was a good place to
start. Not assembly--machine language. Easy enough on decimal
machines--there were quite a few books on this for the IBM 1620.
If you've been exposed to machine langauge before an HLL, I suspect
that you gain a deeper understanding of how langauges work.
On the other hand, there was the B5500...
You could always start kids out on a Turing machine.
Can you teach calculus before arithmetic? (HLL = calculus; Turing
machine = arithmetic).
I'm not sure.
--Chuck