Beginning programming

[Joseph Chiu]

ccel at chance.uucp (CCEL) writes:
>I don't know what kind of assignments I should give the poor
>hapless budding CS undergrads. The system they will be using runs
>Unix, but I think any nice juicy system calls or OS based stuff
>would be over their heads.

I'm curious on how others feel about teaching language classes.  In my high
school, they taught standard Pascal, no OS or machine specific calls whatsoever,
and programming was very "vanilla".  Also, we weren't allowed to use certain
"run-time" (or equivalence of a run-time library, anyways) stuff, but instead
had to make most functions from scratch (obvious exception was writeln, for
example...)

Does teaching "pure" language help people learn better?  Or do you feel that
by allowing beginners to immediately plunge into system/implementation   
specifics and allowing them more "Bang for the buck" programming using vendor
supplied non-standard functions would be better?

>If anyone has any syllabi (syllabuses?) for a C class they could
>send me, or any "basic concepts" that I should be certain to include

I don't know about you, but over here, the first CS class was to design a 
mini graphics editor under X-windows (through macros and functions that
took care of most of the setup & parameter passing).  It went through the
whole white book (it even used the ? : operator!) with graphics programming
thrown in...  Perhaps it may or may not be reasonable, depending on the
nature of the students in the class.


Joseph