Assignment V equality (was: Bliss was Re: DEC program listing

[Huw Davies]

On 16/08/2005, at 2:29 PM, Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner wrote:
>
>   Back in college, I took electronics for non-EE majors.  The first  
> half of
> the course dealt with analog electronics (including the analog
> characteristics of transistors) and while most of the other  
> students had an
> easy time with that portion, I struggled hard and I *still* don't  
> quite
> understand the operating characteristics of a transistor, or what  
> exactly
> the difference is between a PNP and NPN transistor.
>
>   Second half the course though, was digital electronics which I found
> trivial, although most of the other students had real difficulty  
> with the
> concept of +5V being a logical 1 (what?  5 = 1?  What?  What the  
> hell are
> you talking about?) and the less said about Boolean algebra, the  
> better 8-P

Thank goodness there's someone else who had exactly the same problems  
I did. I just thought I was stupid or something :-)

>   And if programmer can't grasp the difference between equality and
> assignment, then heaven help us when you get to pointers ...

The issue I had was teaching FORTRAN to first year Maths students. No  
amount of contrived explanations helped - the standard one being  
comparing variables to street numbers and how the house at number 74  
could contain many different things. Even after 25 years or so it  
still seems a poor analogy. Getting over this conceptual difficulty  
is one of the reasons for teaching assembly language programming in  
CS courses but that's an argument that's basically lost now - teach  
them java, VB whatever's the current fad language (oooh, asbestos  
suit time now - also drifting off topic).

Huw Davies           | e-mail: Huw.Davies at kerberos.davies.net.au
Melbourne            | "If soccer was meant to be played in the
Australia            | air, the sky would be painted green"