Re: university studies?

[Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>]

> On Thu, Aug 02, 2001 at 08:24:45AM +0100, Riley Williams wrote:
> > One thing I will add, from long experience: If you learned BASIC
> > first, then learn Pascal BEFORE you try to learn C or C++ as you'll
> > come out a much better programmer than trying to learn C or C++
> > directly after BASIC.
> 
> This makes me a little bit nervous...  I used to program a fair bit in BASI=
> C ((Q|GW)BASIC mostly), and started learning C++ after that.  Could you ela=
> borate a bit on the reasons?

pascal is a language that teaches you structured programming by making it
excruciatingly painful to write anything else. You can write basic in C and
sometimes people going from one language to the other basically do that.

If you have few classes and a lot of 5000 line subroutines then worry, but
there is no reason to assume that every ex basic programmer isnt going to
pick up C++ and good software design practices just because they once 
wrote basic