Re: Which first-course languages? (was: What schools use Eiffel (was: No top schools use Ada)) ?

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

"found that they were comparing floating-point numbers for equality"

it is a common myth that this is a bad programming practice. In fact many
numerical algorithms involve perfectly legitimate tests for equality if
they know that they are running on reasonable floating-point hardware.
For example, a Newton-Raphson iteration for square root will converge
exactly on almost any reasonable fpt hardware.

It is perhaps a safe rule for people using floating-point who don't know
what they are doing (a common case), to avoid comparing fpt numbers for
equality, but please let's make sure that we don't end up with idiotic
rules that forbid this critically useful operation (IEEE fpt includes
equality for a reason, indeed all the operations defined by 754 are
useful, you should hestitate before declarting them useless).

So, while I am all in favor of an undergraduate curriculum including
discussion of underlying architectures in some considerable details
(including interrupts, registers, caches, data representation etc.)
I sure hope that a course in this area does not pass on the incorrect
advice to never compare fpt for equality.