What is taught in schools...

I discussed with my little sister her university programming tasks again. Even if to abstract from the maxim «Pascal is the best language for teaching» ™ IMHO still there are two important problems:

1 Something is told prematurely — the necessity of such solutions can be understood only conforted by the problem by oneself
2 Not the process of how somebody came to the idea of a solution it is told but the result only.

The separation to a file system and an on-line storage is not necessary, binary number notation was chosen because it is easy to implement; if you so need to bind a program into one big execution file beforehand then you will need the separate compilation for really large projects only.

The modules support in the language is not better than the simple agreement: «do not call functions with names start with xxx».

The knowledge of the result only forms one-sided view of things — it can be done in this way only... misunderstanding of why the result is exactly like this leads to non-using it where it is really needed.

Next time I'll summon my strength and try to explain what the procedures and functions are, what is the black box abstraction and so on.
For my sister has no doubts any more that to write the whole program inside one switch is not good.


Update One more interesting point have come to the surface — students visit lectures, study algebra, math logic, analytic and differential geometry. Teachers say: would you like a bonus? Write a program... find how many non-isomorphic graphs there are for the given number of edges and vertices or factorize a symmetric polynom to prime factors.

Oh... in Pascal? I'm curious how many lines of code a student will write until he stops to understand what sort of FL1, FL2 means, where RuntimeError 210 occurs and what is required to get at all?