On Sat, 10 Sep 2011, Andy Farnell wrote:
Of the languages I've encountered, maybe over 20 if allowing things like
bash and assembly,
They are programming languages just like the others. There isn't a very
universal line between languages that are for programming and those that
are not, but usually, being Turing-complete is thought of as the
tipping-point. This means that anything with a while-statement or a
if...goto statement in it is a programming language, but there are also
turing-complete languages that have neither (which means that they can
emulate while-loops with something else).
"From ML to C via Modula-3: an approach to teaching programming" which
seems like a torturous path to put students through.
I thought you had written «tortuous» but I just realised that «torturous»
also exists.
Well, I agree, for introductory courses. Later in the curriculum, for a
course about the diversity of programming languages, weird combinations
are quite welcome, but Modula-3 is quite redundant nowadays, except when
trying to teach what programming languages used to look like...
Anyway, Tate wants to urge this empirical pluralism, that learning
languages is good for you whether you use them or not, for purely
self-developmental reasons.
Yeah, and probably more so for programming languages than natural
languages, because the former potentially differ a lot more from each
other (unless you pick a bunch of similar ones...).
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| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
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