Re: Why one school changed from Pascal to C++

[rrw1000@cus.cam.ac.uk (Richard Watts)]

In article <allenb.40.004C9240@desun1.epfl.ch>,
Philippe Allenbach <allenb@desun1.epfl.ch> wrote:
>
>Not to begin a language war and personnaly, I don't use C++ but still worth
>reading,I thought it would be interesting to spread this post to other
>newsgroups.
>
>>I found this through a publisher's home page.  It's a paper detailing
>>(It's several screens long, I haven't read it all the way through yet)
>>why the CS program at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne (in the
>>U.K.) switched from Pascal to C++ in their introductory CS class.
>
>>I thought some of you might find it interesting.  Personally, I've
>>always liked Pascal, and I'm glad I was taught it, but I'm really
>>curious about their reasons.  Here's the URL:
>
>>http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/publications/books/apprentice/InstructorsManual/C++_Choi
>>ce.html

 It's interesting that they seem to rate things like initialisation
and overloading as plusses for ADT implementation: experience seems to
indicate that full transparency is often a bad idea (do you _really_
want to give the impression that matrix multiplication is
commutative ?). It's also interesting that they didn't consider
teaching all of Modula-3 - it's quite a small language.

 Their problems seem pretty run-of-the-mill for C++-based courses, and
they seem to have reinvented pretty much all of the important
wheels as class libraries.


Richard.
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