On 11-Apr-2007, at 13:06, Chris Lott wrote:
You're missing the point-- it's not that there is a practical
difference in the examples, it's that there IS a difference, the
students see it, and it is an extra point of confusion that isn't
needed if one is being consistent.
I have to disagree, and have had very little confusion myself in
teaching php. I jsut explain it the way I use it. Use double quotes
unless your quoted text is going to contain HTML with quotes; and as
a bonus, php will expand variables in double quotes.
I completely recognize that the practical effects of the differences
are small, but the learning effects of the inconsistencies is much
larger, particularly with a group of students that are not techies,
not geeks, not computer science or IT students...
Well, non-techie non-geeks are going to get very little out of
learning to code php and are likely going to end up writing crap code
with loverly security holes that bring ebservers to their knees and
propagate millions of spam emails. Walk before you run, and all
that. PHP is not a good choice as a 'learning' language precisely
because it is so flexible.
Much better to teach a much more rigid and concise language like obj-
c or c++ if you want to teach programming to tyros. Heck, even perl.
--
It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all
and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought...should be literally
unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.
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