Quoting Ehud Karni <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> I think the best language to teach young persons is Fortran. After a > VERY SHORT explanation of its principles and an example, a useful > program can be written. It takes much more time to achieve the same > level of usefulness with C. [Shudder] I do have experience in Fortran. That is - unless they changed the language much in the past 12 years or so. I completely disagree with you that data structures are not important. To judge by google, nowadays fortran has pointers and allocatable memory. But do you have a fortran 90 compiler on every machine? Usually, it's still Fortran 77 and its static data structures. If I recall correctly, it doesn't even have local variables. I remember the Pascal textbook of my first programming class in University was called "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs". Maybe Pascal is obsolete, but that title still holds. Perhaps you don't have to teach new very complex data structures. Perhaps it's enough, at first, just to teach a binary tree, and not a balanced tree. But you still need to teach them to use dynamically allocated data, and in a flexible way. Personally, I don't like fixed-format languages. I don't like Fortran's inline formats. I don't like the way it still encourages the use of GOTOs - most textbooks teach GOTO before they teach the proper loop structures. In short, it's a dynosaur, it should be extinct. And all of the benefits you described exist in many other languages. The only thing I agree with you about is the fact that teaching C is bad because it's not clean. Nevertheless, compare fortran with almost any other language, barring perhaps other dinosaurs like Cobol, and the modern one would compare better. Herouth ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
