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Re: Didactic "white lies"

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  Re: Didactic "white lies" Anton Shepelev <anton.txt@gmail.com> - 2019-02-03 18:57 +0300
    Re: Didactic "white lies" Anton Shepelev <anton.txt@g{oogle}mail.com> - 2019-02-04 12:15 +0300

#140495 — Re: Didactic "white lies"

Stefan Ram:

> One white lie I tell at the beginning of my C course, when
> the proper treatment of pointers still is in a remote
> distance:
>
> To explain "char *": "char" means "character", and the "*"
> means the preceding thing can be repeated arbitrarily
> often, so "char *" means "a sequence of characters". -
> Explanation without the need to speak of anything that was
> not treated yet.

Can't you limit string manuipulation to arrays

  char s[255];

and indexing

  char c;
  c = s[14];

before you move on to pointers?

My 8-bit editor cannot handle you quotation marks.

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#140508

Stefan Ram to Anton Shepelev:

>>Can't you limit string manuipulation to arrays
>>
>>  char s[255];
>>
>>and indexing
>>
>>  char c;
>>  c = s[14];
>>
>>before you move on to pointers?
>
>In the beginner's course, I do not do any string
>manipulation, except for printf-printing using a format
>with conversion specifications. (So, e.g., "printf( "%s%s",
>"a", "b" )" is a kind of concatenation.)

I suggest to avoid the use of `*' until it is property
introduced.  You can work with arrays and string literals.

>For the advanced course, I just have started to write an
>explanation of addresses in C, and I would base the
>explanation of arrays and strings on that then.

And until then, both arrays and strings may be considered
abstract black-box types.

>But the demand for C and C++ at the adult education centers
>where I work is falling, and it is well possible that I
>will not give any C and C++ classes anymore comes 2020.
>(Instead people now like to learn Java and Python, which I
>teach too. So I still have something to do.)

That's a shame, now that they are "compiling" Python into C
instead of making something efficient from the start.

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