Re: Teaching OO/C++

[philip@cs.wits.ac.za (Philip Machanick)]

In article <cppD792GC.1uI@netcom.com>, cpp@netcom.com (Robin Rowe) wrote:

> This is what tends to happen if you teach C first. How do you decide 
> when to call it quits and tell the students to forget half of everything 
> they learned to switch to C++? You don't have this difficulty if you 
> teach OO first, then present the syntax as support of it. (You have other 
> problems, like finding a textbook written this way.)

I fully agree. I started my 2nd year class off (previously exposed to
Pascal) with abstraction, classes and objects -- in that order. I spent
less than 10% of my lectures on syntax. They whined terribly about C++
syntax at first, but I just let them pick it up as we went along. It's
been quite a while now since I saw someone trying to get
   FOR i:= 1 TO n DO
past the compiler :(

If you don't think OOP is better than a procedural style of programming,
why teach it at all?

This reminds me about the bad old days when Pascal text books did
procedures last and recursion as an appendix (not quite that bad I
suppose). I used to argue in those days that if this is the order you do
things, you might as well teach FORTRAN.
-- 
Philip Machanick                   philip@cs.wits.ac.za
Department of Computer Science, University of the Witwatersrand
2050 Wits, South Africa
phone 27(11)716-3309  fax 27(11)339-7965