[plt-scheme] A data point on 'match' in intro programming: +++!

It would be *just* one more (and arguably hardly the biggest one).

Your argument is largely the same one people use to justify teaching
Java in the first semester.

Shriram

On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 2:24 AM, Matthias Felleisen<matthias at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
>
> I would love to use match in introductory courses to get away from a lot of
> details. (I introduced match into Scheme 84 in 1984.) Doing so would be a
> great disfavor to our students. Very few of them will end up working with a
> language that supports match, once they are on their first co-op etc. If I
> prepare them with structures/predicates/selectors etc, they have at least a
> chance to adapt some of what they learned in "210" to their work. If we had
> showed them match and even 'deep' matches, it would just be one more large
> conflict between this silly, design-recipe FP stuff and their real world. --
> Matthias
>
> _________________________________________________
>  For list-related administrative tasks:
>  http://list.cs.brown.edu/mailman/listinfo/plt-scheme
>