On 4/5/2012 8:28 AM, Michael Veksler wrote:
It is not that they can't remember. I am a TA at a moderately basic programming course, and student submit home assignments with horrible errors. These errors, such as free(*str) or *str=malloc(n) are easily be caught by -Wall. I have to remember to advise them to use -Wall and to fix all the warnings, which I sometimes forget to do.
Wouldn't it be better in a "moderately basic programming course" to provide standard canned scripts that set things up nicely for students including the switches they need? Indeed for such a course wouldn't it be better to use an appropriate IDE, so they could concentrate on the task at hand and not fiddling with commands. Yes, I think it is very important for students to learn what is going on, but you can't do everything at once in a basic course. And even in the context you give, surely it is not too much to expect a TA to remember important advice like this?
