[plt-scheme] Re: I/O therefore no local

On Mar 1, 5:21 pm, Matthias Felleisen <matth... at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
> On Mar 1, 2010, at 12:19 PM, wooks wrote:
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> > On Mar 1, 4:04 pm, Matthias Felleisen <matth... at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
> >> On Mar 1, 2010, at 9:01 AM, wooks wrote:
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> >>> I am preparing students for external exams.
> >>> I've lost count of number of times I have made similar comments  
> >>> about
> >>> their syllabus.
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> >> I have no problem with this. My recommendation should be translated  
> >> into
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> >>   'prepare the for the exam using past exams'
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> >> and don't try TS!.
>

I see. No I'm not following the TS! curriculum (eg I'm not teaching
HOF's, lambda, doing very little with tree structures and the like and
as you have observed there is more of an emphasis on I/O and arrays).

The design recipe is language agnostic, take that and you really need
the supporting environment and the language to be effective.

I don't think it's a huge leap going from i/o via lists to i/o via
console/file. I think I can say here's how you tweak the template for
lists to handle file/console i/o and arrays the more verbose syntax of
vectors is a syntactic rather than conceptual issue.

The students are being taught an imperative language as well but the
idea is that they get most of their conceptual notions from the Scheme
lectures. The language for answering exam questions is psuedocode/any
language you like.

I felt it was better than teaching imperatively without any
discernible methodology (although an argument could be made for JSP I
guess). I am prepared to be educated on this but "here's what these
statements mean, here's some examples, go away and practice" to me is
indistinguishable from hacking.

Now maybe I am wrong in my choice, but other institutions preparing
for these exams use the old favourites C Pascal Java - the examiners
reports over the years consistently reflect dissatisfaction with the
performance and preparedness of candidates.