From: ok@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Subject: Re: Looking for good Ada95 book
Date: 1996/11/14
Date: 1996-11-14T00:00:00+00:00 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <56dt80$e9e$1@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au> (raw)
In-Reply-To: 563ikc$ipl@felix.seas.gwu.edu
mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman) writes:
>So use a different book... tastes vary.
I think the thing that needs to be made plain is that Feldman's critics
on this topic are not enemies, but "disappointed lovers", people who
_want_ to use his books but for this reason _can't_.
>Rear-guard action? Gimmea break! Damaging to what? To whom? C'mon -
>the RM leaves it up to individuals to set a lexical style.
But it uses a specific lexical style _itself_.
>It's NOT a rear-guard action, merely a pedagogical technique. When I'm
>writing for beginners, I use the capitalized style; when I'm not, I don;t.
>Jeez - not everything has to be so _political_. I'm not opposed to
>the "standard" style; I just bought in to teaching beginners using a
>style adopted by hundreds of Pascal teachers.
I note that the last textbook we used when we were teaching Pascal was
"Foundations of Computer Science" by Aho & Ullman. I just checked.
Lower case keywords throughout. Not even boldface. What you see is
what you type. Jensen & Wirth, of course, used lower case. Kruse
uses lower case. Fisher & Reges use lower case. The UCSD Pascal
Handbook for the P-system (Clark & Koehler) uses lower case. None of
this shows that lower case is a consensus amongst Pascal books, but
it _does_ show that upper case is _not_ a consensus for Pascal books.
>You are right - there are lots of issues, so why do you persist in
>fighting this battle?
Because people *want* to use your books, but because they don't fit in
with other valued books, including the LRM and the AQ&S guides and all
the other code the students are going to see, they fell they *can't.*
If I thought the books were bad books on other grounds, I for one
wouldn't _care_ about the style.
>If the lexical style is really sufficient reason to adopt or reject a
>text, I'd say you're not reading for content...
Unfair. Not reading *JUST* for content, maybe.
Students in this part of the world use the style they were first
taught, and if a later lecturer wants something different, they regard
the _lecturer_ as incompetent and pedantic, and don't do it. Now
that high fees and 'the era of accountability' are upon us, if a course
used inconsistent styles in two years, an internal audit would probably
demand a change. I've just been at a meeting this morning where we
were told that lecturers no longer have autonomy in designing and marking
their subjects.
When I learned Fortran and Algol and COBOL and PL/I, nobody dreamed that
we might need special visual clues to help us tell which were the keywords;
the keypunches had a single case on their keyboards, the printers had a
single case on their drums or chains, and students were deemed to be
sufficiently literate to cope with a handful of special words that
occurred at the beginning of lines. I have seen hundreds of students
successfully taught these programming languages with a single alphabetic
case and no "looks" variations. When did students' brains rot so that
they needed _that_ particular crutch more than any other distinction that
case might make?
Once again, I reckon that our students are, by the standards of my youth,
pretty dim and helpless, but "which are the keywords" is something they
have *no* trouble with.
--
Mixed Member Proportional---a *great* way to vote!
Richard A. O'Keefe; http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/%7Eok; RMIT Comp.Sci.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~1996-11-14 0:00 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 60+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
1996-10-26 0:00 Looking for good Ada95 book Lars Lundgren
1996-10-28 0:00 ` Rapicault Pascal
[not found] ` <01bbc5d8$a3b24e00$6a9148a6@cornerstone.mydomain.org>
1996-10-29 0:00 ` Robert Dewar
1996-10-30 0:00 ` Michael Feldman
1996-11-02 0:00 ` Robert Dewar
1996-11-03 0:00 ` Robert A Duff
1996-11-03 0:00 ` Robert Dewar
1996-11-03 0:00 ` Matthew Heaney
1996-11-04 0:00 ` Michael F Brenner
1996-11-04 0:00 ` Larry Kilgallen
1996-11-04 0:00 ` Robert Dewar
1996-11-09 0:00 ` Michael Feldman
1996-11-11 0:00 ` Richard A. O'Keefe
1996-11-12 0:00 ` Mark Shaw
1996-11-06 0:00 ` James Thiele
1996-11-08 0:00 ` Stephen Leake
1996-11-06 0:00 ` Richard A. O'Keefe
1996-11-06 0:00 ` Robert Dewar
1996-11-06 0:00 ` Robert A Duff
1996-11-04 0:00 ` Norman H. Cohen
1996-11-04 0:00 ` Jerry Petrey
1996-11-06 0:00 ` Richard A. O'Keefe
1996-11-09 0:00 ` Michael Feldman
1996-11-05 0:00 ` Silliness (was: Looking for good Ada95 book) Adam Beneschan
1996-11-06 0:00 ` Richard A. O'Keefe
1996-11-06 0:00 ` Chris Morgan
1996-11-08 0:00 ` bill.williams
1996-11-09 0:00 ` Michael Feldman
1996-11-09 0:00 ` Looking for good Ada95 book Michael Feldman
1996-11-10 0:00 ` Lars Farm
1996-11-10 0:00 ` Robert Dewar
1996-11-11 0:00 ` Lars Farm
1996-11-12 0:00 ` Robert Dewar
1996-11-12 0:00 ` Lars Farm
1996-11-14 0:00 ` Capitalization Entropy (was: Looking for good Ada95 book) Scott James
1996-11-14 0:00 ` Robert A Duff
1996-11-18 0:00 ` Looking for good Ada95 book Richard A. O'Keefe
1996-11-12 0:00 ` Michael Feldman
1996-11-17 0:00 ` Robert Dewar
1996-11-18 0:00 ` Richard Pattis
1996-11-19 0:00 ` Do-While Jones
1996-11-20 0:00 ` John English
1996-11-20 0:00 ` Larry Kilgallen
1996-11-21 0:00 ` FerretWoman
1996-11-22 0:00 ` Richard A. O'Keefe
1996-11-24 0:00 ` Fergus Henderson
1996-11-18 0:00 ` Richard A. O'Keefe
1996-11-18 0:00 ` Michael Feldman
1996-11-20 0:00 ` Testing teaching belief? Richard A. O'Keefe
1996-11-20 0:00 ` Robert Dewar
1996-11-22 0:00 ` Richard A. O'Keefe
1996-11-29 0:00 ` Debora Weber-Wulff
1996-12-01 0:00 ` Robert Dewar
1996-11-20 0:00 ` Robert Dewar
1996-11-14 0:00 ` Richard A. O'Keefe [this message]
1996-10-31 0:00 ` Looking for good Ada95 book Tom Pastuszak
1996-10-28 0:00 ` Larry Kilgallen
1996-11-04 0:00 ` John English
1996-11-06 0:00 ` Wolfgang Gellerich
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
1996-11-12 0:00 Marin David Condic, 561.796.8997, M/S 731-93
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