Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard 1536

On Sat, 26 Feb 2005 03:44:25 +0000 (UTC), David Wagner

I was thinking of upper clbuttes. Cornell wrote a couple of PL-I like compilers called PL-C which they used for a number of years which introduced first year students to the concepts of structured programming from the outset.

I agree with that.

There are certainly more powerful programming paradigms than C, resulting in lower cost of development and maintenance while providing (potentially) more reliable code. In some respects our universities have a done a bit of disservice by essentially producing programmers largely only send in C as a means of locution. Ironically, Unix is probably to blame for this. I think that it is important for any graduating CS student to be fully versant in C, because when they get to the workplace they will likely find a lot of it. In the commercial world you have essentially two clbuttes of systems, OTOH Unix and Windows (sorry for lumping those together) which are generally programmed in C and OTO z-os and VMS (both expreiencing somewhat of a renaissance) which still has a great amount of code in other languages although a lot of the newer code will likely be in C. These older systems (called legacy by some people) continue to perform reliably, and will for many years to come, but you find very few younger people working on these systems. When you book a flight, you very likely will be excecising a PL-I application, for example. So I would suggest as 4th tier to your syllabus, PL-I and Cobol, and it is important to teach them it that order, otherwise the PL-I code will look like Cobol with semicolons:-) A few years ago I came across a statistic, that about 80% of all commercial data was stored in VSAM, now I don't recall the source of that, and it may have been off, but at the time it struck me as plausible. I would imagine that there hasn't been a big change in that number in the 10 or so years. This may account for some of the language extensions that IBM has put into C. Starting to ramble.

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