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From: huang@mnsinc.com (Szu-Wen Huang)
Subject: Re: What's the best language to learn? [was Re: Should I learn C or
 Pascal?]
Date: 1996/08/21
Message-ID: <4vdon9$8nt@news1.mnsinc.com>#1/1
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references: <4v26j4$hkg@news.csus.edu> <01bb8d2f$351b9500$32ee6fce@timhome2>
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 comp.edu,comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++,comp.unix.programmer
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 comp.edu,comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++,comp.unix.programmer
Date: 1996-08-21T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


Tim Behrendsen (tim@airshields.com) wrote:
[snip]
: Hmmm... moving a deck of cards around to learn a sorting
: technique.  Reducing the problem to a very low-level set of
: movement operations to help in understanding procedurally
: what the computer is doing.  <s>Naaah, couldn't work.  Much easier
: to focus on the high-level C abstraction of the sorting
: algorithm. </s> ;->

Lofty, ungraspable concepts like:

  void swap(int *a, int *b)
  {
    int c = *a;

    *b = *a;
    *a = c;
  }
  ...
  swap(&a, &b);
  ...

?  swap(), by the way, is a primitive for just about every algorithms
text I've ever read.  Does knowing the computer must:

  LOAD r1, a
  ADD  something_else_totally_unrelated
  LOAD r2, b
  INC  some_counter_from_another_place
  STOR r1, b
  INC  that_same_counter_but_we_just_need_to_fill_the_slot
  STOR r2, a

in order to swap two integers aid in the understanding of swap()?
I agree that we need to break an algorithm down to primitives, but
are you actually saying swap(), for instance, isn't primitive enough?