I've been teaching CS2 at the University of Dayton for a number of years. Until about 2-3 years ago, both CS1 and CS2 were taught using Ada, with the standard CS1 and CS2 content as far as structures and algorithms are concerned. Then we switched to C++. It's been much harder work, because students have to be taught to apply more self-discipline -- something that's very difficult for college freshpersons. Not only do they have to deal with abstractions (that are hard anyway), they also have to deal with the "touchiness" of the C family (such things as the "=" vs. "==" that Martin mentioned) and the peculiarities of C++ compilers that don't adhere to the standard. I think we've been successful in making the switch -- but there's much less freedom to explore ideas, since we have to spend so much time on picky syntactic details. I think my students are learning as many techniques (abstract and concrete), but they're much more rigid than my Ada students were because of the tight focus. I've taught this course in Pascal, Ada, and C++ and have absolutely no question that C++ is by far the worst of the three. If anyone wants, I can solicit opinions from the other instructors who were on both ends of the switch. Phil Philip W. Brashear Software Quality Assurance EDS Corporation +1.937.237.4510 [log in to unmask] -----Original Message----- From: Wisniewski, Joseph (N-COMSYS) [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: Thursday, October 05, 2000 11:31 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: C++ as a first language My wife teaches mostly C++ over at a major community college outside of DC. (No it isn't quite as bad as Carville/Matalin at home although this morning there was a discussion of "our individual opinions" wrt readability of C++ :--) ) Anyway, apparently there has been a switch recently from Pascal to C++ for the intro class. The intro C++ is being taught without the object oriented aspects of the language, so I guess it really becomes a "C class using the non-object oriented constructs specific to C++ and not in C, and using a C++ compiler", from what I can tell. The professors there are very concerned because their students are performing much more poorly than they did with Pascal as an intro language. Now factoring out issues such as "teaching C++ for the first time" (which maybe is more important in all of this than the language) ..... well what are your all thoughts on this. Joe