On Wednesday 11 June 2003 22:36, Beni Cherniavsky wrote: > Pascal is particuarly painful to write. The limited character set > (designed before ASCII was widespread?) is not a positive feature... > > I also think something like the abstract equivallent of UNIX pipes > should be taught before any langauge at all. The usefulness of pascal > programs doable in school lessons/exams is a joke.
Very true.
> What's the point,
> if you acn't see the bigger picture?
Good point. The exercises given in school have nothing to do with anything
anyone might do in real life. They go like this (a real example of a
conversation I had with my teacher):
- "Exercise: implement a data structure and function set that represent cars
in a parking lot."
- "I'm done, here it is."
- "No, don't use an array of car locations, we're studying stacks today so
you'll have to use a stack."
- "But that means only the last car to come in can come out?"
- "Yes, it does. Glad to see you understand stacks."
- "Uh, but that makes no sense does it? A real parking lot doesn't work like
that."
- "We're not studying parking lots. We're studying stacks."
>
> > The existing idea of writing the so-called verbal algorithms is good in
> > principle; it can help teach programming principles and present
> > algorithms without mucking about with a rather low-level language's
> > syntax. However as presently implemented it has two problems.
>
> Oh, that thing. IIRC, most bagrut questions have to be answered
> twice: write an Hebrew translation of Pascal with numbered lines
> ("algorithm") and then write the Pascal original ("program") :-(.
> It's still like that, isn't it?
Yeah :-(
> The only usefulness of distinguishing
> algorithms from programs is when the algorithm is at a higher-level.
> Yet executable Python code is more high-level (and more readable) than
> the algorithm notation practiced in school.
>
> If it were in english, they would probably notice sooner that it is
> just a mechanic transformation of Pascal ;-).
Yes, the general idea is a good one but the current implementation is quite
pointless... (And they make you write line numbers by hand, and take off
points if you skip one by accident or something. I still don't know what the
point of that is supposed to be.)
--
Dan Armak
Matan, Israel
Public GPG key: http://cvs.gentoo.org/~danarmak/danarmak-gpg-public.key
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