On Sun, Jul 30, 2006 at 10:31:38PM -0400, Lyvim Xaphir wrote: > > It is not the best book for learning programming, but C would be a > > dreadful choice for one's first programming language. > Not necessarily. That is exactly the target course of the book I > recommended elsewhere in this thread tackles that very topic and > abolishes that old wives tale. The old wives are often right. > In fact it's been shown that students in introductory Pascal courses > have no advantages over the students in the introductory C courses, with > the distinction that the C students have greater motivation on the > course material due to the fact that they are learning a production > language. Comparing to Pascal is hardly fair or even useful, since it's barely used anymore (outside of Borland's Delphi). A better comparison would be Python, which is designed to be both a learning language *and* practical. -- Matthew Miller mattdm@xxxxxxxxxx <http://mattdm.org/> Boston University Linux ------> <http://linux.bu.edu/>
