Re: C Programming

On Sun, Jul 30, 2006 at 10:31:38PM -0400, Lyvim Xaphir wrote:
It is not the best book for learning programming, but C would be a
dreadful choice for one's first programming language.
Not necessarily. That is exactly the target course of the book I
recommended elsewhere in this thread tackles that very topic and
abolishes that old wives tale.

The old wives are often right.

In fact it's been shown that students in introductory Pascal courses
have no advantages over the students in the introductory C courses, with
the distinction that the C students have greater motivation on the
course material due to the fact that they are learning a production
language.

Comparing to Pascal is hardly fair or even useful, since it's barely used
anymore (outside of Borland's Delphi). A better comparison would be Python,
which is designed to be both a learning language *and* practical.

--
Matthew Miller mattdm@xxxxxxxxxx <http://mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux ------> <http://linux.bu.edu/>

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