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Have you said -- and if not, would you be willing to say -- where your nephew goes to school? I'm starting to be mildly curious about the curriculum, and I'm guessing they have a Web site that gives some details.

Anyway, if they're truly making no attempt to teach the students something about bit representations and machine language, they're not following the most recent ACM guidelines for a CS degree curious), which explicitly include some exposure to both topics as part of the "core material" curricula should include. I don't know how many schools follow these guidelines, or how closely, but they seem like a reasonable guideline to what the pointy-headed-academic community thinks should be taught.

One problem (for the schools that try to follow the guidelines) is that there's kind of a lot of that "core material", and in my limited experience it's a little tricky to cover it all without having so many required courses that the degree program becomes unworkable. At the school where I teach, at least some of the people who teach beginning programming talk about bit representations of integers, but most of the discussion of what happens at the bit buttembly language machine language level(s) happens in a combined course on computer architecture and buttembly language. Obviously there's a limit to how much one can do in one course, but students who are paying attention will get some exposure to *a* machine language and the corresponding buttembly language, plus bit representations of basic data types.

So, some of us CS profs are trying. ("Very"? Yeah, probably.)

-- B. L. Mbuttingill ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.