Shlomi Fish
Sun, 16 Sep 2001 23:35:31 -0700
On Mon, 17 Sep 2001, mulix wrote:
> On Mon, 17 Sep 2001, Nadav Har'El wrote:
>
> > On Mon, Sep 17, 2001, Tzafrir Cohen wrote about "[Haifux] using unix page: early
>draft":
> > > In this course the students write two c++ assignments, and one csh
> > > assignment (right, Alon?)
> >
> > Forgive my asking (I guess that everybody here already knows my position on
> > csh ;)), but why is the Technion still teaching csh?? Csh has been considered
> > inferior to almost any alternative (ksh, bash, zsh) for at least a decade...
> > Do they teach csh anywhere else in the world?
>
> the technion teaches csh, i suppose, because by the time most students
> take this course (second semester), the ONLY programming language
> they've seen is, you guessed it, c. [1]
>
> the "common wisdom" says that it's better not to confuse them with a
> different programming language syntax. an interesting trivia peace is
> that the csh assignment is considered by far the easiest in the class,
> and usually takes the least time to complete.
>
Hello? If C-shell looks like C as much as French looks like English, IMO.
Sure, they use the same alphabet, but knowledge on one language will give
you very little help in understanding the other.
I found the bourne shell to have a much better syntax than C-shell, and
found C-shell to be awfully limiting and illogical. I think the Technion
should make students get used to learning a new syntax, because there are
a lot of syntaxes out there.
I think that academic studies should teach something that would prove
useful outside their academic studies. And C-Shell is not useful. I saw
how in an assignment we were given in "Structure of OSes" (of EE), which
specifically asked for a C-shell script, two students over-blown their
script just so they can handle directory names with whitespace. Needless
to say, in the bourne shell this is a non-issue which can be easily
solved.
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
> [1] ok, they've also seen some pdp11 asm. irrelevant.
> --
> mulix
>
> http://www.advogato.com/person/mulix
> http://www.sf.net/projects/syscalltrack
>
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Haifa Linux Club Mailing List (http://linuxclub.il.eu.org)
> To unsub send an empty message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Home Page: http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/
Home E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
A more experienced programmer does not make less bugs. He just realizes
what went wrong more quickly.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Haifa Linux Club Mailing List (http://linuxclub.il.eu.org)
To unsub send an empty message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]