3 Jan
2012
3 Jan
'12
12:39 p.m.
On 01/03/2012 02:42 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
A very early memory of mine was reading a BASIC program for the first
time. I saw a line like this:
40 A = A + 1
...and I remember being very confused, saying "no, it isn't!!"
Pascal's assignment operator does little to address this, and APL's
does it well, but since all it took was reading like two sentences in a
book to learn what was going on, it seems this isn't really a big
problem in search of a solution.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
New Kensington, PA
Neil Lincoln
once told me that he thought that APL was the perfect
language to introduce one to programming. He said his kids took to
it like ducks to water.
It does have a few specific items that work for beginners, such as use of
an arrow for the assignment operation leminates the beginner mistake of
3 = X
(I think that for first day programmers (which actually translates to
almost a semester!), that "LET . . . " helped convey the difference
between assginemtn and equality.)