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From: je@bton.ac.uk (John English)
Subject: Re: Comparison of languages for CS1 and CS2
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Date: Fri, 30 Jun 1995 01:15:30 GMT
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Tom Payne (thp@PROBLEM_WITH_INEWS_DOMAIN_FILE) wrote:
: Those who choose (or are forced) to C++ in CS1 face the task of deciding
: which subset to teach and how to order it.  It is possible to begin with
: a subset that corresponds (somewhat) to Basic, or to Pascal, or to C.
: One can also add libraries that make many "convenience" features, such as
: strings or bounds-checked arrays, appear to be built in.

: Unfortunately, serious articulation problems will ensue if everyone picks
: their own extended subset to teach in CS1.

Stroustrup said that one of the worst mistakes he made with C++ was releasing
it without a decent class library.  The forthcoming ANSI standard will
address these issues with, among other things, a standard string class
and of course STL to deal with data structures & algorithms in a big way.
Similar problems arose in Ada with everyone producing their own "simple
I/O" packages to avoid having to teach generic instantiations from day 1.
Is the problem that languages have become too big to teach to beginners
at all?  Most students these days are used to GUI environments, WYSIWYG
word processors and so on, and they use these to write the documentation
for their text-mode "Hello world" programs.  The result seems to be a
choice between having vast libraries to master or being restricted to
text-mode "hello world" stuff.  Isn't this one of the roots of the problem?
Is there anything one can do about this? (I ask this in a spirit of pure
mischief... :-)

-- 
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John English <je@brighton.ac.uk>, Dept. of Computing, University of Brighton
  "The Tory party is the cream of society: rich, thick, and full of clots"
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