On Thursday, December 19, 2013 6:19:04 AM UTC+5:30, Rhodri James wrote: > On Tue, 17 Dec 2013 15:51:44 -0000, Wolfgang Keller wrote: > > The only issue for me was to figure out how to do in C what I already > > knew in Pascal. And I had to waste a *lot* more time and mental effort > > to mess with that language than it took for me to learn *both* the > > basics of programming per se *and* Pascal in the first class at my home > > university.
> It's sounds like you made, and are carrying on making, one of the classic > mistakes of software engineering: you're trying to write one language in > the style of another. It is possible to write C code as if it were > Pascal, but it's a painful process and it won't be pretty. It's far > better to use a language as it is rather than as you want it to be. Yes but the reverse is also true: Sometimes the best code in language L is first conceptualized in design-language D and then 'coded' into L. When we were students D was called 'flow-charts' Gone out of fashion today and replaced by UML. Now I expect the majority on this list to not care for UML. However the idea of a separate design language is not negated by the fact that UML is overkill and silly. eg Saw this (on the Erlang mailing list) In some Australian university (in the 90s) 2 sems of Cobol was replaced by 1 sem Scheme + 1 sem Cobol. Students learnt more Cobol in the second arrangement than in the first. [Note: 'More Cobol' not 'More Programming'] Now if you were to ask those *students* I would expect similar emotions towards Cobol as Wolfgang is expressing towards C. That is however a separate issue :D -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
