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Reply-To: "Anders Wirzenius" <anders.wirzenius@pp.qnet.fi>
From: "Anders Wirzenius" <anders.wirzenius@pp.qnet.fi>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
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Subject: Learning methods
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Date: Fri, 19 Jan 2001 07:49:44 GMT
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"Robert Dewar" <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote in message
news:947hj1$o1r$1@nnrp1.deja.com...
> In article
> <Pine.BSF.4.21.0101180808230.9927-100000@shell5.ba.best.com>,
...
>
> An analogy is a piano, you can read a set of specifications
> that clearly tell you, press this key to get middle A, which
> is 440Hz etc. But you do NOT get an idea of how to play Chopin
> from such specs. And even if you were Bach, you might still

I suppose that you by "specifications" don't mean the notes.

> find yourself a bit mystefied by a Chopin score without any
> examples of how it sounded on a modern piano.

Some musicians discourage their colleagues not to listen to other performers
interpretation for not to be too affected by their way of playing.

> I have not tried to insist on students learning languages from
> the standard, but I have tried to insist that they read the
> standard. I taught a course on language standards a while ago,

I have used a two-phase method sometimes:
1. Learning by playing (not the piano :-). That was pretty much learning by
example and making own examples over and over again.
2. Learing by specification. That meant going back and start reading the
specification or the manual starting from page 1.

Phase 1 raises me to a level where I don't have to use a major part of my
energy to learn to understand the basic concepts. Phase 2 is time consuming
but it is the only way of raising your knowledge to the level_of_wisdom.

> formal document than me. Phil Shaw wrote a thesis describing
> a language GYVE for operating system construction. He read
> the A68 report, immediately understood and liked it, and
> wrote a complete 2 level grammar for GYVE as part of his
> thesis.

Maybe he was not familiar with the language, but he certainly was an
experienced interpreter of specifications.