APL\360

On Fri, 29 Jan 2021, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote: Therein lies one of the largest problems for first exposure to programming. NO! We are NOT talking about "first exposure" as meaning a few years; we are talking about the first few DAYS (for most students, but up to weeks/months for some). By the time that you got HERE, you had forgotten what you struggled with on your first day(s). They have been brought up with enough math that they "understand" that X = 3 means that X has a value of 3. But why not 3 = X ? As Chuck said, it is the fundamental difference between equality (property) and assignment (operation). To a programming language, 3 = X is a request to take the current value of X, and assign that as the NEW value of the "constant" 3. And the compiler won't cooperate! Early versions of BASIC had a keyword "LET". LET X = 3 is devoid of most of the ambiguity, and LET 3 = X is much less likely to be attempted. 'Course, changing the values of constants opens up some strange possibilities! A few other languages have used other different symbols for assignment, to avoid the confusion of "equality" Without OTHER changes in parsing arithmetic expressions, that may or may not be warranted, just replacing the '=' being used for assignment with an arrow ELIMINATED that particular confusion. Well, mostly. You can't use a right pointing arrow to fix 3 = X I spent years introducing students to their first contact with computers. MY first was FORTRAN. My father handled the statistics for the "CBS National Driver's Test". IBM provided the computers, the port-a-punch cards for mail-in responses (printed with a box for where to put a stamp!), and the programming. One of the early percentages in the LIVE show didn't add up to 100! If you look over Walter Cronkite's shoulder, you can see my father frantically manually recalculating the numbers. The next morning, my father had the dining room table covered with manuals, and we started to try to learn FORTRAN. IIRC, over a short time, we settled on the books by McCracken and Decima Anderson. BTW, I consider BASIC to be very good for "FIRST EXPOSURE", IFF it is limited to that, and other languages are soon introduced. I don't agree with Dijkstra: "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." -Edsger Dijkstra It takes a substantial OVER-exposure to cause the damage. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com