> Beginners, even young children, can be taught simple programming and > string handling without knowing anything about bits and bytes, certainly > without having to know whether the e acute they just typed is stored as > one byte or two. Just as people can and do learn to drive cars without > knowing anything about the nuts and bolts or how the engine works.
I really don't agree here. Beginners, even young children, can get the concept of characters being mapped to numbers. Certainly those young children that will thrive on programming will have a fascination with this process in and off itself (it's just like the kids- in-treehuts type cryptography such kids often like). When I was 9 I thought the ASCII code table was one of the most beautiful things in the world! Chapter 16 of Unicode4.0 would have made me ecstatic then (hey, it comes close now). I think the resistance of some programmers to using more than 8 bits for a character is due to them not wanting to let go of something they grew up with rather than concern over efficiency or simplicity. Okay, so I'm a nerd (if chapter 16 makes you think of the opening scenes of _The Matrix_ you might be a nerd, if the opening scenes of _The Matrix_ makes you think of chapter 16 you definitely are) and my own experiences only count for so much, but I don't think characters -> numbers -> bytes -> bits is particularly difficult as programming concepts go, or even é <=> e + ´ when compared to many higher-level string handling activities (regular expressions, bidirectional over-riding, and the subtler points of case operations). Even so, I think it's making those two levels meet that is the biggest stumbling block for beginners. -- Jon Hanna | Toys and books <http://www.hackcraft.net/> | for hospitals: | <http://santa.boards.ie>
