🚀 go-pugleaf

pjh@mccc.edu (Pete Holsberg) writes:
> For a person who does not know structured programming ideas, Pascal is a
> must. The people who have the most difficulty (in my experience in
> teaching C) are those who are experienced in COBOL, BASIC and FORTRAN.

  Now waitaminit.  That is *NOT* correct.  I myself learned to program in 
BASIC and a smattering of Assembly.  After the first few years, I started 
spontaneously organizing my programs as subroutine calls and loops (yes, 
BASIC has loops - you just have to explicitly code them as IF...GOTO 
lines).  It's the only organization that really makes sense for large 
programs...  And when I started working in C, I discovered that my coding 
style was considered normal (tho' I must admit I'm less neurotic about 
GOTO than most C or Pascal programmers...  perhaps because I know that 
all loops are just CMP...JMP statements in assembly).
 
  When I taught myself COBOL and FORTRAN later, I found that both of 
these have better looping constructs than BASIC did.  I see no reason why 
structured programming would be difficult in either of them.  It may not 
be as elegant-looking as C, but it produces the same results.
 
> =5) Picking up Assembler prior to learning C isn't a bad idea.
> =    Hardly required, tho.
> 
> Many explanations of what C can do (and more importantly, what you did
> wrong in your program) are best explained to a person who knows what a
> computer does and how it does it, a background that is acquired fairly
> easily by learning any assembly language. IMO, of course.


  I'd say those who learn assembly are going to be better machine-level 
programmers in the long run, but it's not something really required.  You 
learn just as much about how the machine works from programming in a 
high-level language as in assembly.  (By machine-level programmers I mean 
people who rewrite their OS, or modify system calls, etc., not people who 
program in assembly - that'd be a self-evident statement, eh?)
 
  In fact I'd like the computer makers to ship a C compiler & editor 
(preferably integrated) and a good book on learning C ("Programming in 
C", by Stephen Kochan, was the book I learned from) with all computers 
instead of BASIC.  It's no harder to learn to program in C than in BASIC, 
and C is a lot more useful (since you get a real executable out of it) 
and socially acceptable (too many snobs look down on BASIC...  <sigh>)

 - Mark Hughes (Caves of Steel 509-624-1821)  mhughes@comtch.spk.wa.us