From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Thu, 2 Aug 2001 14:22:12 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Thu, 2 Aug 2001 14:22:02 -0400 Received: from router-100M.swansea.linux.org.uk ([194.168.151.17]:48132 "EHLO the-village.bc.nu") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Thu, 2 Aug 2001 14:21:47 -0400 Subject: Re: university studies? To: bradmont@bradmont.net (Brad Stewart) Date: Thu, 2 Aug 2001 19:23:28 +0100 (BST) Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org (Linux Kernel) In-Reply-To: <20010802111309.A29322@bradmont.net> from "Brad Stewart" at Aug 02, 2001 11:13:09 AM X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.5 PL5] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: From: Alan Cox Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org > 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