Shoutbox

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Originally posted by absorbation
Why teach C when you can teach a better language with more functions that is now used more today.

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Any programming course for persons without prior programming experience (which, I assume, is what this is) will spend a lot of time dealing with general programming concepts -- different types of variables, what are functions and how to use them, loops and conditional statements, and so forth.   It so happens these are the things that overlap between C and C++. 

Where there are differences on that level, C++ ways are often more confusing to a novice. 

For example, a C++ course would be obligated to use streams (cout << "Hello world!") instead of stdio.h (printf("Hello world!").  Realize that the student is likely to see the above long before they've been told anything about operator overloading.  I'd hate to be the instructor having to explain how the C++ way works at that point, should an observant student inquire why we are using the bitwise left shift operator in a funny way.

Hell, we learn VB6 in my school. (grade 10/11 for sure) I'm sure its partly because of the budget and not being able to afford newer versions, but really, they dont need to. VB is great for teaching people programming concepts, and once you get the main concepts you can take your knoledge to another language. The ideas are basically the same, the sytnax is different.

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Originally posted by absorbation

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Originally posted by segosa
Both languages have exactly the same syntax. It doesn't matter which you start with. Think of C++ as C with extra features.

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Ya, my point exactly. Why teach C when you can teach a better language with more functions that is now used more today. It does have some changes, mainly to the basic structure of the code, but they say learning C++ is easier without knowing C. I found C++ a really easy language, mainly because it is so similar to PHP which is basically a web based version of C ++

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Simply put, "C++ applications are generally slower at runtime, and are much slower to compile than C programs. The low-level infrastructure for C++ binary execution is also larger. For these reasons C is always commonly used even if C++ has alot of popularity, and will probably continue to be used in projects where size and speed are primary concerns, and portable code still required (assembly would be unsuitable then)."

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Originally posted by lizard.boy
Hell, we learn VB6 in my school. (grade 10/11 for sure) I'm sure its partly because of the budget and not being able to afford newer versions, but really, they dont need to. VB is great for teaching people programming concepts, and once you get the main concepts you can take your knoledge to another language. The ideas are basically the same, the sytnax is different.

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Have you learnt VB and then tried to learn a more low-level language like C++? I have. It's hell. VB totally distorts all your ideas of how programming should be and makes it very difficult to understand the  small intricacies of C or C++. A good example being pointers.

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Originally posted by segosa
Have you learnt VB and then tried to learn a more low-level language like C++? I have. It's hell. VB totally distorts all your ideas of how programming should be and makes it very difficult to understand the  small intricacies of C or C++. A good example being pointers.

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True, I have tried to learn VB, but  Visual Studio seemed bloated and because I know PHP the syntax or C++ came to me easier and I understood how it worked pretty quickly.

When I say C++ is better than C, I mean why are schools teachings older more outdated languages when they can teach newer ways to code software. Of course C had some advantages over C++. C++ was last revised in 2003 and hopefully should reflect changes in modern software

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Originally posted by absorbation
I mean why are schools teachings older more outdated languages when they can teach newer ways to code software

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Again, I must draw attention to the fact that the two most well-known operating systems (Windows and Linux) are written more in C than any other language. The same should apply to the BSDs, which grew from Unix, which was written in C. Far from being 'outdated', C is thriving. It's even nicked a few features from C++ along the way.
I know C was last updated in the 80s, but it just goes to show how well-designed a language it is, to have required no updates in two decades.

As a language to teach high-level concepts, C doesn't cut it, I admit. But that's why there's languages such as C++, C# and Java, which have a C-like syntax. For teaching low-level though, thsese high-level languages don't cut it. C does.

At the end of the day, for high-speed programs and low-level tasks, only assembly code is practically better than C. And assembly code is a real bitch compared to C.