Re: Need help bad!!!!!

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

David Hoos says

"It would really be nice if we could get people to read the LRM before
posting questions, but, alas, I find in my work in industry that even
people who have been programming for years are too lazy to look it up if
there's someone nearby handy to ask."

Two responses, first, why should they bother, if you are willing to answer
their questions in such detail for them. This teaches laziness. Please be
careful about helping students TOO much, see my previous post on this
subject. You are NOT doing them a favor by spoon-feeding them. They need
precisely to learn how to read and solve their own problems.

Second, the RM is not at all the right source to point people to. Instead
they need to be reading a good text book. Much of the RM is inpenetrable
even to most of the experts, unless you already understand 95% of what
you need already. It *is* good for filling in the remaining subtle 5%

Also, to be fair, Annex A is more accessiible than much of the rest, but
still sending a student with this level of misunderstanding to the RM is
not helpful!

Students tend often to the path of least resistance in doing assignments.
They write down some approximate junk without making any effort to find
out how to do things (trying to use Text_IO as though it is identical
semantically to C getchar is an example), and then get people to help them
fix it.

Let's be helpful to students, but not TOO helpful :-)