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From: Colin Paul Gloster <Colin_Paul_Gloster@ACM.org>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Ada for 1st year students
Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2008 17:01:43 +0100
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Reply-To: Colin Paul Gloster <Colin_Paul_Gloster@ACM.org>
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On Mon, 13 Oct 2008, Georg Bauhaus wrote:

|----------------------------------------------------------------------|
|"Colin Paul Gloster wrote:                                            |
|> On Sun, 12 Oct 2008, Georg Bauhaus wrote:                           |
|                                                                      |
|> |------------------------------------------------------------------||
|> |"                                                                 ||
|> |[..]  I guess this then                                           ||
|> |will be the first time that the CS mathematicians start seeing the||
|> |harm that their intuition is doing to computer programming..."    ||
|> |------------------------------------------------------------------||
|>                                                                     |
|> What harm is being done?                                            |
|                                                                      |
|Distraction from the topics of computer science (knowledge            |
|of the computer).  Try to minimize things that (a) are not            |
|about computers and (b) need additional knowledge of largely          |
|unrelated detail.  [..]"                                              |
|----------------------------------------------------------------------|

Perhaps it is possible to concentrate excessively on mathematics, but
would you disapprove of the following exercise from a textbook because
it requires a basic familiarity with things which are not computers?
"Suppose every student except student b passes their electronics
exam. Write the relevant Pascal program text for representing the set
of students who fail electronics." Those things being for example any
of a student; electronics; failure; and calling a student "b".

|----------------------------------------------------------------------|
|"  CS needs to put limits on mathematical high school intuition.      |
|E.g., if you want to study computers, and only computers,             |
|then knowing sets is probably more to the point than knowing          |
|integrals.                                                            |
|                                                                      |
|[..]"                                                                 |
|----------------------------------------------------------------------|

One should know about integration if one is designing a computer which
performs integration (which is a computational chore).

I agree that sets (or things like sets) are almost always important.

|----------------------------------------------------------------------|
|"You can express Type + Operations as a tuple,                        |
|                                                                      |
|  ({Rot, Orange, Gelb, Gr=FCn, Blau, Indigo, Violett},                  |
|           -- the values                                              |
|   {Succ, Pred, ...}).                                                |
|           -- the operations                                          |
|                                                                      |
|Is this, I guess algebraic style, typical of high school              |
|mathematics?"                                                         |
|----------------------------------------------------------------------|

I suspect that it is not.

Regards,
Colin Paul Gloster
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