high school programming & python

[Dennis Lee Bieber]

On Tue, 14 Sep 1999 01:13:19 -0700, "Phil Mayes" <nospam at bitbucket.com>
declaimed the following in comp.lang.python:

> This is, as you imply, a fallacious argument; if carried to its logical
> extreme, we shouldn't teach C because students will be spoiled and not
> want to use assembler.  In fact, assembler spoils people for machine
> language :-)

	Over on the Amiga groups we recently had a massive thread
involving someone that insisted on Assembly and direct hardware
accessing, and didn't care that his programs would not run on newer
machines with graphics boards or advanced CPUs, and even on the machines
it would run on would leave the OS in a "reboot or nothing" state. IOW,
someone that thinks the be-all/end-all of programming is to do fancy
sound/graphics demos which have no productive use but cycle usage.

	OTOH, I recall once using in-line assembly in a short FORTRAN
program (yes, the compiler used "X" in column 1 to flag assembly code)
in order to do byte level access (the FORTRAN IV compiler only had
4-byte integer access).

	As for the second spoiling? Well, my assembly class had an
assignment of emulating the hardware floating point operations using
integer ops and subroutine calls.

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