Re: Need C++ tutor for 10th grade student

["Jerry Feldman-2" <user=4@nabble.blu.org>]

 On Wed, 13 Feb 2008 15:21:56 -0500 
"Samuel Baldwin" <[hidden email]> wrote: 

> It's great that the kid wants to learn, but s/he's probably better off 
> financially if they save their money and buy something like Learning 
> Perl (or that K&amp;R book about C I have yet to read.) 

I have my original version of K&amp;R, pre-ANSI. I learned C on a project 
in 1980. 
I'm not sure what a good language should be to teach the principles of 
good computer programming. C and C++ are good languages, but not good 
for teaching. Pascal is a good teaching language but I think that Java 
might be better. 

One of the important things that need to be presented is how data 
structures relate to programming.  When I teach at Northeastern, I also 
stress portability. For instance if you save integers and floating 
point variables in a binary file, they will be saved in endian format. 
Intel and DEC machines are little endian meaning that the least 
significant byte is stored first, where Sun and HP systems are big 
endian where the most significant byte is stored first. This is also 
very important when you are sending data over a comm link. If the 
sender is a Linux on Intel and the receiver is a Solaris/sparc, if you 
don't format the data properly things won't work. 

Additionally, in standard C and C++, size parameters are defined as 
size_t. This type will be 32-bits on a 32-bit machine and 64 on a 
64-bit machine. If you declare a size variable as an int things may be 
messed up. (the Java developers were C people, and they understood 
these issues. C was designed to write operating systems with. That is 
why on Java a 'long' is always 64-bits). 

-- 
-- 
Jerry Feldman <[hidden email]> 
Boston Linux and Unix 
PGP key id: 537C5846 
PGP Key fingerprint: 3D1B 8377 A3C0 A5F2 ECBB  CA3B 4607 4319 537C 5846 
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