From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,808505c9db7d5613 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: ok@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au (Richard A. O'Keefe) Subject: Re: Looking for good Ada95 book Date: 1996/11/14 Message-ID: <56dt80$e9e$1@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 196438813 references: <32723F6A.54A3@dtek.chalmers.se> <55955a$n04@felix.seas.gwu.edu> <563ikc$ipl@felix.seas.gwu.edu> organization: Comp Sci, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia nntp-posting-user: ok newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1996-11-14T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: 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.