From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Thu Dec 11 2003 - 17:44:40 EST
On 11/12/2003 10:02, jon@hackcraft.net wrote:
>>Beginners, even young children, can be taught simple programming and
>>string handling without knowing anything about bits and bytes, certainly
>>without having to know whether the e acute they just typed is stored as
>>one byte or two. Just as people can and do learn to drive cars without
>>knowing anything about the nuts and bolts or how the engine works.
>>
>>
>
>I really don't agree here.
>
>Beginners, even young children, can get the concept of characters being mapped
>to numbers. Certainly those young children that will thrive on programming will
>have a fascination with this process in and off itself (it's just like the kids-
>in-treehuts type cryptography such kids often like).
>
>When I was 9 I thought the ASCII code table was one of the most beautiful
>things in the world! ...
>
Well, there are junior nerds and there are ordinary kids. I might have
been like you if ASCII had been invented when I was 9 (1964, so I
suppose it was just about around, but I had never heard of computers
then). But ordinary kids want ... well, I don't really know, but they
want programming made simple and they are probably more interested in
doing things with words than with numbers.
>... but I don't think characters -> numbers -> bytes -> bits is
>particularly difficult as programming concepts go, or even é <=> e + ´ when
>compared to many higher-level string handling activities (regular expressions,
>bidirectional over-riding, and the subtler points of case operations).
>
>Even so, I think it's making those two levels meet that is the biggest
>stumbling block for beginners.
>
>
>
Indeed. But I don't see why the average beginner, rather than the junior
nerd, needs to make the two levels meet. They can work at the level they
are comfortable with, which is likely to be that of words and default
grapheme clusters, and leave the system to sort out the subtle stuff.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
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