William Murray wrote:

> In article <34ff11df.753819154@news.peacesummit.com>,
>    ian@peacesummit.com (Ian Upright) wrote:
> >John Seitz <seitz@pobox.com> wrote:
>



> It is interesting the criteria for deciding on the first language to learn.
> The 2 year technical college in my old hometown had as their FIRST COURSE for
> Comp Sci majors - 370 Assembler.  The reasoning was that AL immerses the
> student in the "basic" structure of the machine and the operating system.

REDICULOUS!  And they got people to BELIEVE them?  The STRUCTURE depends on the
machine.  You don't operate on a frog to learn the structure of a human.
Sructures CAN be similar, but often vary greatly.  The 370 doesn't run DOS,
WINDOWS, UNIX, VMS, etc....  So MOST people will learn NOTHING of the OS!

> At
> least that was the stated reason; I also heard that the "real" reason was a
> "survival of the fittest" test.  It weeded out those students who could write
> "simple" programs in easier languages but did not have the skills/desire to
> handle complex systems.

Well, it would backfire!  Some that would learn would get scared.  Some 370
programmers are NOT good programmers.

> NOTE: I don't really agree with this viewpoint; just thought it would be
> interesting to introduce a different view.  Of course, that was a long time
> ago and they have probably changed to a truly cryptic language, like C. <g>

Well, at least C is something they can use elsewhere, is popular, and has a
STANDARD set of Portable Operating System Interface (functions) eXtended(AKA
POSIX)!

It ALSO has things that are just as complicated as assembly, so they might have
their "weed out" feature too.

Of course, I do NOT consider C a good first language to learn.

Steve