How far can stack [LIFO] solve do automatic garbage collection and prevent memory leak ?

[John Bokma]

Paul Rubin <no.email at nospam.invalid> writes:

> Hugh Aguilar <hughaguilar96 at yahoo.com> writes:
>> I've read a lot of graduate-level CS books.
>
> Reading CS books doesn't make you a computer scientist any more than
> listening to violin records makes you a violinist.  Write out answers to
> all the exercises in those books, and get your answers to the more
> difficult ones checked by a professor, and you'll be getting somewhere.
> That's the point someone else was making about self-study: without
> someone checking your answers at first, it's easy to not learn to
> recogize your own mistakes.
>
> Anyway, as someone else once said, studying a subject like CS isn't done
> by reading.  It's done by writing out answers to problem after problem.
> Unless you've been doing that, you haven't been studying.

Yup. I would like to add the following three:

1) being able to teach to peers what you've read.

   As explained in a post I made: during several courses I took you got
   a paper from your teacher and had to teach in front of the class the
   next week. Those papers are quite hard to grasp on the first reading
   even if you know quite a bit of the topic. Understanding it enough
   to teach in front of a class and being able to handle the question
   round, in which the teacher participates, is quite a killer.

2) being able to program on paper / understand programs on paper.

   On several exams I had to write small programs on paper. The
   solutions had to compile (i.e. missing a ; for languages that
   required so was counted against you, or using optional ;).  One exam
   was about OOP and several OO languages were taught, and hence on
   paper one had to provide solutions in C++, Objective-C, Object
   Pascal, Smalltalk, Eiffel, etc. No compiler(s) handy.

   And of course questions like: what's wrong with this piece of code
   and how should it be written.

3) being able to write papers and a thesis (or two)

   No explanation needed, quite some people have no problem reading the
   required books, passing the exams, but need quite some time to do
   this (and some give up on it).

-- 
John Bokma                                                               j3b

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