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From: moroz@inist.ru (Oleg Moroz)
Subject: Re: standardization (Re: Lisp versus C++ for AI. software)
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Date: Sun, 6 Oct 1996 18:36:09 GMT
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On 04 Oct 1996 15:03:44 -0500, John David Stone <stone@math.grin.edu> wrote:

>> Vendors have been
>> working hard to implement the "draft" ANSI C++ standard, there are
>> numerous textbooks explaining it, ...
>
>        Very amusing.  The best part of the draft standard, as opposed to
>existing implementations of C++, is the Standard Template Library.  Of the
>scores of introductory C++ textbooks currently on the market, I'll bet
>there aren't half a dozen that so much as tell the student what's _in_ the
>Standard Template Library, let alone how to use it correctly.  Accurate
>coverage of function objects is even rarer.  And far more textbooks give
>complete C++ source code for the bubble sort (!) than mention the sort()
>function from the algorithm library.

Well, I won't go deep into discussing STL (in my opinion it's really pretty good
does what it was intended for - to show that templates and generic programming
can be used to make C++ libraries more flexible and useful - but it's too weak
and non-obvious to use to be included in the standard), but isn't the purpose of
the textbooks on C++ to teach the student program in C++ first ? And the bubble
sort, while being one of the worst sorting methods, can be used just nice to
demonstrate many of the C++ (and most other procedural/hybrid languages)
features. I think that the standard library (streams, STL, etc) should be taught
much after the first principles, if at all, at least its crrent usability is
pretty low, when comparing with, say MFC and OWL.

Oleg
