15 Aug
2001
15 Aug
'01
8:48 a.m.
On Wed, 15 Aug 2001, Paul Williams wrote:
At the school I attended, we started with C, and *quickly* switched to
Modula-2. I have absolutely no clue why we didn't start with Modula-2.
It's a robust and beautiful language.
Peace... Sridhar
Horses for courses. The "low esteem" would
probably be reserved for the
few nutters who would like to construct large systems solely in assembly
language, and then find that no one else can maintain them. However, as
I work in the embedded real-time world, I mostly construct systems that
are a hybrid of assembly and a high-level language.
I work in nonsequential (massively concurrent) robotics, and we write our
movement routines in assembler (basically the lowest level... servo
commands), and then do all the logic in Smalltalk, and all the interface
in VB (!).
I've
always thought that one of the more simple assembly languages
would be a great 'first language' for someone wanting to learn how
to program. Who's with me?
Strangely enough, the curriculum setters for "O" level Computer Studies
back in the early 1980s. Before we moved onto BASIC, we were taught
CESIL (Computer Education in Schools Instructional Language), which had
statements like "JIZERO label" instead of "while" or "for"!
Unfortunately our particular interpreter missed one of the advantages of
assembly language -- it was written in BASIC and crawled along on our
RML 380Z. If the monitor program of the 380Z had disassembled
instructions, it would have been a much better tool and we all could
have learned Z80. (That got relegated to my lunchtimes).