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Old 04-12-2001, 08:58 AM   #18
russotto
Professor
 
Join Date: Jan 2001
Posts: 1,788
Quote:
Originally posted by Tony Shepps
I agree.

I went through CS in 1985 when college CS was just getting started. The brutal weed-out is always expected in programming. It's just necessary. They do it a lot worse in college pre-med courses; in CS it's "You aren't capable of this" while in pre-med it's "You can't HANDLE this". People are brutalized.
Err, my father went through CS when college CS was just starting -- his degree is mathematics with a concentration in computer science. That was circa 1966.

The weedout at University of Maryland College Park involved a class where you did all your programming in something called 'CF Pascal'. CF was for "Character and File" -- those were the only two types you had available. No steenking integers, no strings, no arrays, just character and file. The class also involved proving programs correct, which is where I learned that attempting to prove a program correct is pointless because the proof is more error-prone than the program... I don't think the professor appreciated that insight :-).

(hmm, what happened to milk?)
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