[TUHS] Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language - Unearthed!

Steffen Nurpmeso steffen at sdaoden.eu
Sat Sep 2 00:17:15 AEST 2017


Nemo <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:
 |Shades of Myfol vs. Yourtran!
 |
 |On 31/08/2017, Steffen Nurpmeso <steffen at sdaoden.eu> wrote (in part):
 |> and i still hear
 |> myself asking the teacher "What?  A language without goto?"
 |
 |Pascal has always had goto.  (One of Wirth's pascal compilers even
 |jumped from within one function to a label inside another function!)
 |
 |The construct was removed in Modula.  (As Parnas has said, the problem
 |is not having a comefrom to go with the goto.)

No, no, not the Pascal that we had to use there.  Definitely not.
Anyway, that is my rememberance, and i had to work with this for
a few months, and it (the GUI) surely had that command index page,
too.  I surely have looked for goto.  It was running under DOS.
(It was a German school, no University.  Thus.)  Hm.  Maybe
a castrated educational version?  Could that be?  Has such thing
ever existed?  Possibly even with the possibility for the teacher
to activate an extended command set for the progressed learners??
Interesting.

Sorry for the rest.

  I am coming from the holistic side anyway so that purely
  intdoctrinating education without cultivating heart and soul "i"
  (thus, say, since maybe 15 or 16, or 17) never liked.  I recall
  Smalltalk being proposed for education, but regardless of the
  language i think the most important part is that the children
  becomes curious and tries to discover and develop.

  I personally do not think that automatisms are good at all.  If
  you cook, you have to clean the kitchen.  If you tinker with
  your car or motorcycle you have to clean your tools at least.
  If you want to reap you have to sow.  If you want to use dynamic
  memory you have to release it.  Some things have to be let.
  That is also something important to be learned.  You can say
  bees are dying and that is good, let's just kill the rest and
  anything else that interferes, because the computer managed
  bee-drones that are being developed will not need no neutral
  zones at all, so a field with genetically manipulated seeds and
  massive crop eh protection can be layed out right beside an
  organic farming one.  They exactly follow the desired plan.  So
  to say.  Or you let, and possibly even create living willow
  fences surrounding them and the one or the other accompanying
  tree, too.  Like Prince Charles promotes since at least the
  1970s, if that remark is allowed.  To me the latter sounds more
  healthy, also mentally.  Admittedly all that needs fresh water,
  an emerging of the increasing problems.

  So nice and tiny, controllable and fully understood little
  objects are surely something good, letting them play together is
  like bouncing balls in the circus, but omnipotence dreamings
  should be targeted in the educational process also in the
  western world, me thinks.

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)



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