NetNews Offline 2/NetNews Offline Volume 2.iso/news/comp/lang/c++-part1/1074

Internet Message Format | 1996-08-06 | 3.8 KB

Path: news1.ucsd.edu!usenet
From: [e-mail] (Darin Johnson)
Newsgroups: comp.edu,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++
Subject: Re: C or C++ for a 14-year old?
Date: 08 Jan 1996 16:33:02 -0800
Organization: UCSD Computer Science and Engineering Department
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[e-mail] (William Hutto) writes:
> 10 FOR I=1 TO 10
> 20 PRINT "YOUR NAME HERE"
> 30 NEXT I
> 40 END
>
> RUN

That's much of the problem with BASIC.  More modern BASIC's are
better than this, why go back to the 70's way of doing things?
You don't need a label on every line.  It just makes things
harder (renumber is a kluge to get around a bad feature).

What about

    For I=1 to 10
    print "your name here"
    next i
    end

With no labels.  Or better yet, forget the wierd for statment
(that was very hard for me to grasp when I first saw it, because
first I kept trying to fit the English meaning of the words into
place, and second, it wasn't explained that this was just a shortcut
for a while statement)

Personally, I think it's just as easy for a beginner to understand

   i = 1
   while i <= 10
      print "your name here"
   done

Not only is it easy to understand, you start to see statements in
terms of groups of statements, not a sequential list.  You start
to see programs as a hierarchical structure, not a flowchart.
And when you get to BASIC programs of over 50 lines, things get
ugly *fast*.  Why should the beginner struggle deciphering a few
pages of BASIC code, when they could breeze through the same amount
if it were written in a Pascal like language?

[C program removed]
>     This *program* requires considerably more explanation. Also, if this
> is not a C *interpreter* the student needs to know something about compilation
> and may even need to know about files and linking.

Yes, C isn't so great for the beginner.  Elementary Pascal programs
aren't so bad.  There's a little preamble, but simpler than C, and
far fewer "just do it that way, I'll explain later".

>     The ultimate *destination* might be a commonly used/accepted language.
> I went from BASIC to 6502 assembly language, 8086 assembly language, C, C++
> and then Pascal. When I got to Pascal I thought, "Oops, wrong way!"
>     I almost wanted to say, start with assembler.

First thing I did was Cardiac - a cardboard instructional aid to
computers (yeah right, no one had computers back then, at least no in
hick towns).  Then something that had relays and such, looking a lot
like a sturdy version of the radioshack electronics kits.  Then I got
access to a real computer, and did a bit of assembler.  Then I looked
over at the TSR machine next to the Altair and said, hey, that's a lot
simpler, and I don't have to punch in a bunch of bootup code either
:-) Then I did a bunch of basic, hurting my head trying to decipher
the long programs.

Then I saw Pascal in college, and for the first time, I related
programs to math, and things were elegant, not a jumble of code.
Things were abstract, not tied to the nuts and bolts of the machine.
It was just so vastly different from the way I had looked at things
before.  You could actually write huge programs and be able to
understand it for once.  So maybe, there's still a little bit of me
that thinks the beginner should do things the hard way, just to get a
better appreciation of high level languages (and then I wise up and
realize that the lesson would be lost on 90% of the them).
--
Darin Johnson
[e-mail] --  Strange things are afoot at the circle-K...