John McCormick wrote:
> Today we did arrays and they couldn't believe that
> anyone would put up with a language where the index has to start at zero.
> Students with C backgrounds cannot understand why they would want it any
> other way.
Yet more evidence that early exposure to C results in irreversible brain
damage... :-)
Did they also complain about C's other array deficiencies - no bounds
checking, access by p++ as well as [] ?
I recently attended a UML course where I told the (C++) lecturer that Ada (83)
does not support arithmetic on pointers - his immediate question was "But then
how do you traverse an array?" This mind-set of being unable to distinguish
between the logical properties of data and its physical implementation is
terrifying at times!
Richard Stuckey