Re: Looking for good Ada95 book

[ok@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au (Richard A. O'Keefe)]

mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman) writes:
>I rest my case. (pun intended.) Even my freshmen are usually cool enough 
>to use lower-case reserved words once they get to be sophomores. I even
>suggest that they do so.

Your freshmen are not our undergraduates.
Our undergraduates are hostile to the idea of a common coding style.
When I say "hostile", I am not exaggerating for effect;
the things I was called when I asked that C code be run through indent
(with a profile that I provided) just before sending it to me for marking,
they'd make your hair curl.  "Fascist" was the least of them.
I wasn't even asking that they _write_ in a particular style, only that
they _indent_ to that style just before posting!
And these are second-year students, not first year students.
I'm not sure what a sophomore[%] is, it's not a word we use, but these
are wise fools indeed.  This semester just past, students were told, by
the lecturer running the course, and repeated again in the published 
marking guide for each assignment, that they would lose marks if they
didn't follow the AQ&S guidelines for layout and naming.  Well, they
lost marks.

>Maybe your freshmen are inherently smarter than mine; they need no emphasis
>to help them distinguish reserved words. Fine.

First observation:  the AQ&S style *distinguishes* keywords from identifiers,
and very successfully at that.

Second observation:  from what I can see, our students are, um, rather
more academically challenged than yours.  They have mediocre to poor
literacy skills and essentially no common sense.  (For example, in a 2nd
year assignment about priority queues, I provided an implementation of
"leftist trees", they were told about the Feldman data structures, and
the very textbook they were using had a complete priority queue package,
and they were explicitly told they could use any one of these, yet most
of them wrote their own, and that badly.  Sigh.)  For many of them, the
art of using the index in a book is a black mystery.

Yet one thing our students have *no* trouble with is keywords.
Even our 1st year students.
The keywords tend to be in syntactically salient positions.

Let's face it, we are trying to teach a whole lot of things in a short
time.  (3 or 4 years is a short time.  It's taken me 20 years to learn
some of the things I try to teach.)  One of the things we are trying to
teach is that you do not write code to please yourself, but to communicate
to other people.  This is *amazingly* hard to get across; exposure to
computing in schools has convinced the students that programming is all
about one person telling one computer what to do, and it is heartbreakingly
difficult to change their minds about this.  One aspect of communicating
with other people is adopting a shared style; placing the benefit to other
people above one's own taste.   The students need to see *us* doing this,
which is why I have conformed my own style to the AQ&S.  (Semper reformanda;
the AQ&S does not yield all its wisdom in a single reading.)  The students
also need to see the textbooks doing the same thing, because when they see
a textbook author doing his own thing, they claim the same right.

By the way, I am co-supervising a masters student whose thesis bears on
the problem of evaluating whether first-year teaching choices actually
produce the outcomes they are supposed to:  if there is research which
shows that "KEYWORD Identifier" does actually work better with 1st-year
students than "keyword Identifier", I, the other supervisor, and the
student, would be most grateful to hear of it.

[%] The third dictionary I checked had it:  "a 2nd year student at an
American university".
-- 
Mixed Member Proportional---a *great* way to vote!
Richard A. O'Keefe; http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/%7Eok; RMIT Comp.Sci.