[Info-vax] Opportunity for VSI?

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 12/19/18 9:16 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 12/19/2018 8:47 PM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>> On 12/19/18 7:38 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>> Ada95 is a much bigger language than Ada83.
>>>
>>> And as with other language that got redesigned then
>>> I believe that such a redesign is not as clean as it
>>> would have been if it had been done so from the beginning.
>>
>> But, the amount of it that a first year college student would
>> use in a first programming course is so small that either of
>> them would be more than adequate and easy for a student to
>> pick up.
> 
> Probably true.
> 
> But the fact that such a course cannot cover all or at least
> most of the language is a good indication that the language
> is complex.
> 
> You could teach most of standard Pascal in 6 months.

A good first programming course does not teach any language
at all.  It teaches concepts and the language is only the
tool used to present those concepts.  That's why I have seen
Fortran, BASIC, Pascal, Ada, Java, Python, Ruby, C and a number
of other languages used at various educational institutes and
levels for that first programming course.  The concepts to
be covered and the audience who is the target are (and should
be) the deciding factor in which language to use.

bill