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Path: utzoo!watmath!watnot!watrose!cdshaw
From: cdshaw@watrose.UUCP (Chris Shaw)
Newsgroups: net.cse
Subject: Re: students editing output
Message-ID: <7582@watrose.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 1-Oct-85 20:58:04 EDT
Article-I.D.: watrose.7582
Posted: Tue Oct  1 20:58:04 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 2-Oct-85 01:33:27 EDT
References: <433@uvm-cs.UUCP> <1500@brl-tgr.ARPA> <647@bu-cs.UUCP> <150@l5.uucp> <685@bu-cs.UUCP>
Reply-To: cdshaw@watrose.UUCP (Chris Shaw)
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 33

In article <685@bu-cs.UUCP> root@bu-cs.UUCP (Barry Shein) writes:
>>From: laura@l5.uucp (Laura Creighton)
>>
>>I had a thought.  You send students through 4 years of a cs program
>>and threaten them with everything under the sun if they cheat. Then you
>>ship them out into the real world and I wonder why every third c program
>>I see is written by someone who thought that he had to reinvent the
>>strcmp, strncmp and related functions.
>
>Good point, but *I* claim the problem is the insistence on teaching
>with Pascal. Your example provides an excellent example of why:
>
  ..all sorts of prattle about the difficulty of using Pascal strings 
>
>The result: Everything ends up to be ad hoc one-shots, forget building
>generic libraries, write your own everything. 
>
>	-Barry Shein, Boston University

What does this have to do with programming in C ?
If someone can't or won't learn a news language more suited to his purpose,
then you ARE going to get the kind of nonsense above. But when writing
C programs, being taught Pascal has almost nothing to do with reinventing
the wheel. Being lazy/stupid has a lot more to do with it.

Another problem, of course, is institutions which teach "Pascal" as opposed
to "Structured Programming", or "FORTRAN" as opposed to "Numerical Analysis".
If you regard a computer language as anything more than a tool, then you are
going to get people who can't solve problems very well.

Chris Shaw    watmath!watmum!cdshaw  or  cdshaw@watmath
University of Waterloo
In doubt?  Eat hot high-speed death -- the experts' choice in gastric vileness !