"W. Wesley Groleau x4923" wrote:
> > ..... After
> > seeing Ada in two courses, our students take our operating system course
> > using C. We do not teach them C, they pick it up during the first
> > couple of weeks in the Op. Sys. course. The first time we did this, I
> > was concerned about the transition because the guy who teaches OS did
> > not know Ada. His experience was:
> >
> > 1. The students ask the right questions, like
> > "How do I package in this language?"
> > 2. They use variable names that are more than two letters long.
> > 3. They do not abuse the ++ operator.
> > 4. They write readable C programs.
>
> Just to play Devil's Advocate, do they learn the hard way about the value
> of the things they lose by changing languages? (abstraction support, type
> checking, range checking, not having to have Makefiles, and on and on....)
No, they learned the easy way, they learned Ada first{:-). As a result, they
can spend more time on concepts. If you come from concepts and avoid language
hacking, you avoid the pothole, sinkholes, ...
Jack
--
John (Jack) Beidler, Ph.D., Professor of Computer Science
Computing Sciences Department, University of Scranton, Scranton, PA 18510
Mailto:[log in to unmask] Phone: (717) 941-7774 Fax: (717) 941-4250
http://www.cs.UofS.edu/~beidler
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