Re: Text_IO for other standard types

["Jean-Pierre Rosen" <rosen.adalog@wanadoo.fr>]

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Marin David Condic, 561.796.8997, M/S 731-96 a �crit dans le message
<98012009510954@psavax.pwfl.com>...
>Robert Dewar <dewar@MERV.CS.NYU.EDU> writes:
>>I strongly dislike the magic cooking recipe approach. Yes, you can get
>>students to accept it, but in my opinion damage is done since you
>>compromise the critical principle that people should understand what
>>they are doing.
>>
>    When the students in question are a) engineers and/or b) have
>    experience with some other language (usually Fortran or Basic, in
>    my venue) they typically won't sit still for "just use this and
>    don't question it." Hence you look for ways of avoiding discussing
>    generic instantiation until you've gotten them comfortable with
>    the basics.
Of course, it may depend on the kind of students you have. Mine are
engineers in a short (6 days) course. So "you'll see that later" really
means "you'll see that tomorrow", something that is (in my experience)
easily accepted.

I won't discuss every point in this thread because it is getting quite long,
however I think there is an interesting issue, from a pedagogical point of
view. Personnally, I use 'image with caution, because I think that it is
much better to use the true IO packages. Some of the reasons for that are:
1) IO packages have more evolved formatting capabilities.
2) 'image may have unfortunate effects if your line length is bounded (a
value can be wrapped around an end of line)
3) IO packages have the interesting property that if you write data with a
given loop, you can copy the loop and change every "put" into a "get" to
read the data back.

So, the pedagogical issue boils down to whether it is better to tell "do it
this way, you'll understand later why", or "do it this way" and later tell
"don't do it the way I mentionned before". Personnally, I prefer the first
approach.