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wrote, in part:

Of course, the answer is for a general introductory course to cover all the material which isn't particularly germane to the actual skills the students are going to need from the program for their future employment ... but which still supplies essential background to make sure they understand the other stuff.

One can't cover everything well, so the things that 'ought' to get covered end up being covered briefly.

Of course, that leads to naive students being buttigned problems like "add two 100-element arrays together using the instruction set of the IAS computer" ... a real-life example, as it happens, from comp.arch, where someone was recently looking for help with his homework.

Myself, I would have introduced students to "real iron" using something a *bit* less historic (but still without index registers)... say the PDP-8, a perennial favorite. But after a week, the students could then forget about it again.

Of course, *some* requirements do mean a whole course. I *hope* your CS students are taking first-year calculus ... on the other hand, I hope they're not required to take "bonehead English" unless they show signs of needing it.

Come to think of it, perhaps many CS majors will never use most of what they would learn in first-year calculus, but they should have *some* mathematical background...

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