19 Aug
2001
19 Aug
'01
11:23 a.m.
> But could any language have punctuation more
demented than C?
On Sun, 19 Aug 2001, Sellam Ismail wrote:
C's punctuation is simple and logical:
-Semicolons . . .
That's it
That's a good explanation of C's use of semi-colons.
But it gets messier when you explain some of the context sensitive
characters, such as & or *. In order to avoid the character set
availability problems that plagued APL, they used digraphs, such as "/*",
and had some characters having MANY different meanings, depending on
context.
I think "for" loops in C are semantically
bunk, but they work, and you can
do some interesting things with them.
I usually introduce the "for" statement after doing "while" for a
while,
and explain what "for" does in terms of the equivalent "while" loop.
But the
program there [(UC Berkeley)] 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.
Good point. from other schools that are IDENTICAL other than not
having a calculus
prerequisite.
UCBerkeley has some GREAT graduate projects. But I don't think that they
are a credible example for how to introduce people to computers. Their
lower division undergrad CS is way too flawed.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com