C Programming

[Matthew Miller]

On Sun, Jul 30, 2006 at 10:31:38PM -0400, Lyvim Xaphir wrote:
> > It is not the best book for learning programming, but C would be a
> > dreadful choice for one's first programming language.
> Not necessarily.  That is exactly the target course of the book I
> recommended elsewhere in this thread tackles that very topic and
> abolishes that old wives tale.

The old wives are often right.

> In fact it's been shown that students in introductory Pascal courses
> have no advantages over the students in the introductory C courses, with
> the distinction that the C students have greater motivation on the
> course material due to the fact that they are learning a production
> language.

Comparing to Pascal is hardly fair or even useful, since it's barely used
anymore (outside of Borland's Delphi). A better comparison would be Python,
which is designed to be both a learning language *and* practical.

-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org          <http://mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>              <http://linux.bu.edu/>