Re:The cost of forsaking C
by imron on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @10:08PM
(#16373108)
Agreed.
When I did my undergrad, Ada was the primary language of instruction for first year, with x86 assembler taught as a subject in the second semester.
The idea being to get us thinking about programming correctness from the beginning, then to teach how the machine worked once we had a good foundation.
By second year we were just expected to know C, and coming from assembler, things like pointers were something I never had a problem understanding.
Start high to get a good grounding, go low to understand how everything works, then return high to write code that has a good grounding in how it will be executed on the machine.
When I did my undergrad, Ada was the primary language of instruction for first year, with x86 assembler taught as a subject in the second semester.
The idea being to get us thinking about programming correctness from the beginning, then to teach how the machine worked once we had a good foundation.
By second year we were just expected to know C, and coming from assembler, things like pointers were something I never had a problem understanding.
Start high to get a good grounding, go low to understand how everything works, then return high to write code that has a good grounding in how it will be executed on the machine.