On 22 August 1998, Paul O Bartlett <pobart(_at_)access(_dot_)digex(_dot_)net>
wrote:
On Sat, 22 Aug 1998, Liviu Daia wrote (excerpt):
No matter what language you're using
these days, you should still be familiar with the mental paradigm of
pseudocode, from your days in school.
Unless, like me, you went to school when there was not yet such
a thing as "computer science" (and certainly no degrees in it) and
the brand spanking new IBM 029 card punch was a hot item. Some of us
have wired plug boards for punched-card tabulating machines and have
never written a line of C (I can spell it, though; does that count?).
Pseudo-code? I never heard of it when I was in school.
You still miss my point. I was referring to the _paradigm_ of
pseudocode. That's a kind of mental scheme involving if-then-else and
loop constructs, procedures, functions and so on. You are probably
familiar with it more than anyone else, since at those days it was the
_only_ widely used approach to programming (consequently, it wasn't
given any special name). It's called "structured programming" today,
and it's associated with the "pseudocode" notation, but those are just
fancy names for what you were doing 25 years ago. Perhaps surprisingly,
this is still a common place these days, even though some people are
trying hard to forget that. Please read again what I wrote. I was
actually preaching that such an approach would make procmail syntax look
familiar to most people.
(On an unrelated topic, believe it or not, but I used a punched-card
machine myself.)
Some of us who are struggling to use procmail never got any
instruction in unix-think, either.
Now, that's not really relevant here, is it?
Regards,
Liviu
--
Dr. Liviu Daia e-mail: daia(_at_)stoilow(_dot_)imar(_dot_)ro
Institute of Mathematics web page: http://www.imar.ro/~daia
of the Romanian Academy PGP key: finger
daia(_at_)stoilow(_dot_)imar(_dot_)ro