Path: csiph.com!weretis.net!feeder9.news.weretis.net!news.misty.com!news.iecc.com!.POSTED.news.iecc.com!nerds-end From: Cóilín Nioclásín Glostéir Newsgroups: comp.compilers Subject: Re: A tiny self-hosting compiler used for teaching Date: Fri, 04 Sep 2026 21:12:41 -0000 Organization: Compilers Central Sender: johnl%iecc.com Approved: comp.compilers@iecc.com Message-ID: <26-09-002@comp.compilers> References: <26-08-007@comp.compilers> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Injection-Info: gal.iecc.com; posting-host="news.iecc.com:2001:470:1f07:1126:0:676f:7373:6970"; logging-data="51279"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@iecc.com" Keywords: courses Posted-Date: 04 Sep 2026 20:24:26 EDT X-submission-address: compilers@iecc.com X-moderator-address: compilers-request@iecc.com X-FAQ-and-archives: http://compilers.iecc.com Xref: csiph.com comp.compilers:3754 Congratulations on an FPGA implementation. "Interestingly, there is usually another group of students as well. Many of them already know me from previous mathematics courses and are curious to see what a programming course taught by a mathematician looks like." says HTTPS://Github.com/michael-lehn/not-abc/tree/main/hpc0-sessions/session00 "No previous programming experience is assumed. Designing such a course is surprisingly similar to teaching first-year mathematics." says HTTPS://Github.com/michael-lehn/not-abc/tree/main/hpc0-sessions Michael Lehn wrote: |------------------------------------------------------------------------------| |"[. . .] | | | |[. . .] When teaching C, | |I always found declarations unnecessarily difficult to explain. [. . .] | | | |[. . .] | | | |[. . .] | |[. . .] But for beginners this means that | |they already need to understand operator precedence [. . .] | |[. . .] | | | |[. . .] | | | |[. . .] | |[. . .] the subsequent HPC courses use C or C++. The idea is that once | |students have learned the basic concepts in ABC, moving on to C should require| |learning C's declaration syntax rather than learning another substantially | |different language. | | | |Interestingly, when I introduced ABC some years ago, several colleagues were | |quite concerned about this. Their argument was that students without prior | |programming experience would now have to learn _two_ languages instead of | |one, making things even harder for them. | | | |[. . .]" | |------------------------------------------------------------------------------| Normally a compiler module is in the 4th year of a degree, so students already used to have many "previous programming experience"s including with C. So why are the ABC students ignorant of C (and even with no "previous programming experience") at the start of this module? Are they mathematicians or non-computer-scientists or non-software-engineers? HTTP://Gloucester.Insomnia247.NL/ explains an easy way to find a real email address for me.