On 04/05/2012 03:43 PM, Andrey Belevantsev wrote:
FWIW, in our "basic programming" course students have to hand their
homework to an automated testing system which forces the compiler
options we think useful, including all the relevant warning switches
and -Werror. Of course, there is a web page explaining the meaning of
the switches and TAs help with emphasizing their importance to
students. And indeed, you can't do everything in an 101 course, thus
not much of this (helpful) information remains in their heads. But
it's better than nothing.
We don't have such an automated testing system at our faculty (IE). I
had to write my own
automated testing which took me too much time to complete. Sometimes I
excel at the NIH
syndrome, well at least I learned python on the way.
Anyway this is not quite a 101 course, since it also introduces low
level stuff like 2's complement,
FP representation, caches, assembly, profiling, concurrency, address
translation, and more. As
I said, too much in a short time. Remembering a specific GCC flag will
be lost in the noise for too
many students, especially if they think that they will never work again
with GCC after the course.
Which is probably correct for quite a few of them as this is Industrial
Engineering & Management,
not CS or EE.
Michael
