Re: Should I learn C or C++ first?

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From: Philip Machanick
Date: Wed, 16 Aug 1995 18:05

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In article <40m2do$mkj@seagoon.newcastle.edu.au>,
c9228759@lily.newcastle.edu.au (Dean Fogarty) wrote:

> I have to disagree with you.  While OO principles may be great, they
> don't necessarily contribute to better code (note I did not say modular -
> modularity is very important).  However, understanding the fundamentals
> is very important.  If you don't have the basics under control (such as
> the details of data structures and their use) then programming in
> any language will be difficult.

Using someone else's abstractions is an important skill on the way towards
understanding how to design your own. If giving an introductory course, I
would start from OO principles, making it a rule to reuse existing code as
much as possible, and gradually work towards algorithms issues.

Analogy: if you want to design a car, it's helpful to learn how to drive first.
-- 
Philip Machanick                   philip@cs.wits.ac.za
Department of Computer Science, University of the Witwatersrand
2050 Wits, South Africa
phone 27(11)716-3309  fax 27(11)339-7965

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Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!macadamia.cs.wits.ac.za!user
From: philip@cs.wits.ac.za (Philip Machanick)
Newsgroups: rec.games.programmer,comp.lang.c++
Subject: Re: Should I learn C or C++ first?
Date: 16 Aug 1995 18:05:51 GMT
Organization: Computer Science Dept., Wits
Distribution: world
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