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List:       mumps-l
Subject:    Re: M for teenagers?
From:       "Michael S. Simpson" <MichaelSim () WORLDNET ! ATT ! NET>
Date:       1997-07-19 23:33:12
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James Allen Self wrote:
>
> Michael S. Simpson wrote:
>
> > Don't get me wrong here, I love
> > M and would much rather program in it than any other language
> > including
> > C or Java but any M programmer will tell you that M does not lend
> > itself
> > to structured programming very well
>
> I don't buy that. Perhaps I don't understand what you mean, but I see
> nothing that prevents you from writing well structured modular code in
> M.
>

Remember we are talking about junior programmers here.  I said that M
does not LEND itself to stuctured programming very well, meaning that it
can be done, but there are tricks that junior programmers don't need to
be burdened with at this young stage.

> > If a pascal
> > program bombs then it tells you where you made your mistake.  If an M
> > program bombs it tells you where but you got to know how to read it
> > and
> > know what M7 means.
>
> I take it you are working on a system which does not supply descriptions
> for error codes.That may be an argument against certain implementations
> of M, but it is certainly not universal. Beyond that, decoding a large
> table of error codes is a good basic programming exercise to illustrate
> some of the strengths of M compared to C, Pascal, BASIC, etc.
>

Of course my system supplies descriptions for error codes, but I am an
experienced M programmer and can read them.  I am simply saying that for
BEGINNERS Pascal's error codes are easier to understand and correct, IN
MY OPINION.

> > If you had to use M as your very first language you might have gotten
> > so
> > frustrated with it that you would have quit.
>
> Definitely not. I think that if I had been first introduced to MUMPS,
> instead of FORTRAN, ALGOL, BASIC, etc., I would have gotten seriously
> into computing 10 years earlier.

This is the 90's and we have better ways of teaching our young
programmers.  I grow weary of this discussion and I am going to let it
die the meaningless death that it deserves with this, my last, rebuttal.

Mike

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