> I don't follow. An analogical explanation on its own doesn't > lead to knowing how something works, and the presence of > processes that can be explained that way doesn't cover the > whole thing.
It depends what you mean by "know". You are clearly taking a much deeper interpretation of know than I am. I (sort of) know how a microwave works but if you were to push me on any of the details I would quickly dry up. If you know that a compiler reads a special language and translates it into another special language then you know something about how it works. And you can progress this down to the quantum level if you want. Where does proper "knowing" start? I still haven't had time to read the original article that frank referenced so haven;t seen what claims are being made, but I can say that CS has expanded and it has become harder and harder to fit material in a 3 year course, the first major thing that we dropped was the compiler course. (I am not saying this was a good thing, just that that was what we did). The argument was that the important stuff about parsing and stuff was taught in other modules as well. And to be fair, writing compilers *is* a fairly specialised task these days, that not a lot of people are involved with. (When I were a lad we were always writing compilers for things but it just doesn't happen now - perhaps that was because compilers were our "trick" and people today have different tricks (actually, I tend to write interpreters rather than compilers - compilers is a very Rob Pike trick though) L. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PPIG Discuss List (discuss@ppig.org) Discuss admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/discuss Announce admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/announce PPIG Discuss archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40ppig.org/
