Ha ha ha. I don't know about an hour!!!
I meddled with Lisp and clips in my advanced AI module, but didn't get very
far as there wasn't much coverage in the lectures and I wasn't going to go
out and buy a book as there was lots of other things to do -including heavy
drinking sessions, football, cricket, etc. ;-)
Yes, Turbo Pascal was our introduction, and it was a good way of introducing
us to structured programming.
I quite like the whole OOP thing though (just prefer prototyping again and
again as opposed to structured design like the waterfall ;-)
--
Paul Williams
http://www.msresource.net
http://forums.msresource.net
ptwilliams said:
Turbo Pascal was my first introduction to programming in College. Now don't
get me wrong - I'm no programmer, I just did what had to be done in College
and Uni. (Pascal, C, Java and C++) but one thing I liked about Turbo Pascal,
which I've been looking for in VBScript with no such luck, was the gotoxy()
function. Great for column-type output. Where has the functionality gone??
<g>
Turbo Pascal was basically what C became, with plenty of
additions to make it work easily on a DOS machine.
To this day, the finest book on "How to THINK like a programmer"
is "Software Tools in Pascal" and I still try to re-read it at least
once per year. (It's difficult to convince newbies why they want
to read a book on an obsolete language but the key is the TOOL
MENTALITY.)
As for NetBIOS programming I admire you older programmers - you really had
to write code. Nothing nice and easy like try {} catch, etc. now ;-)
Most people don't really understand the need for error
handling anyway -- but it's not really that hard, just incredibly
tedious to write you own.
Remember, everything you write in a high level language is
ultimately translated by the compiler into assembler, or
ultimately into machine language which is just assembler
without the mnemonic codes.
But today, I can get so much more done in Perl most of the
time, and of all the languages that I really know (about 30
for production code) Lisp is still the most fun if you can get
it for your platform. (Quality Lisp compiler that is.)
VB is great for Windows graphical programs.
As for assembler...well, that just astounds me.
It's not really hard if you just THINK good programming.
I actually learned to program on a CALCULATOR (HP and TI)
which is actually good training for both assembler and symbolic
programming. (Ok, I went to 2 classes in ForTran during college
before I dropped the course as worthless.)
Can you read binary??? <g>
Of course, but that's not hard and a few minutes (about an hour)
with me and you could do so too. <really>