Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site ncsu.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!bonnie!akgua!mcnc!ncsu!mauney
From: mauney@ncsu.UUCP (Jon Mauney)
Newsgroups: net.cse
Subject: Re: students editing output
Message-ID: <2944@ncsu.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 30-Sep-85 17:03:19 EDT
Article-I.D.: ncsu.2944
Posted: Mon Sep 30 17:03:19 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 3-Oct-85 03:43:11 EDT
References: <685@bu-cs.UUCP>
Organization: N.C. State University, Raleigh
Lines: 33

>> From: laura@l5.uucp (Laura Creighton)
>> ... and I wonder why every third c program
>> I see is written by someone who thought that he had to reinvent ...

> From: root@bu-cs.UUCP (Barry Shein)
> Good point, but *I* claim the problem is the insistence on teaching
> with Pascal. Your example provides an excellent example of why:
>   ... [example of how it is hard to write generic procedures
>       in Pascal (with at least 3 syntax errors :-) ] ...
> The result: Everything ends up to be ad hoc one-shots, forget building
> generic libraries, write your own everything. And completely forget
> portability, it doesn't exist in the pascal world.

A) Occasionally I feel the need to point out that although Pascal is far
   from ideal, it is quite possible to write large programs with separate
   compilation while maintaining reasonable portability, that C pretends
   to provide strings but really doesn't, and that portability is a major
   problem for C code as well as Pascal code.  But the interminable argument
   between C and Pascal is not the point. The point is ...

B) I do not believe that the problem is due to the (very real) defects in
   Pascal, but to the way programming is taught.  I first learned FORTRAN,
   then PL/I, and much later Pascal.  Both FORTRAN and PL/I allow external
   units and libraries and conformant array parameters, and PL/I has untyped
   pointers.  But we only wrote ad hoc one-shots, never generic routines
   nor did we reuse other code.  Pascal courses could teach re-use of code,
   perhaps at the source level, but they don't.  The problem is the
   syllabus, not the language.

-- 

Jon Mauney,    mcnc!ncsu!mauney 
North Carolina State University