[TUHS] Re: What would early alternatives to C have been?

below... (At the risk of a case of being in disagreement with someone I rarely am). On Sun, Mar 9, 2025 at 10:03 PM Douglas McIlroy < douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu&gt; wrote: I disagree here. I have wtchged too many young programmers that I realized did not understand what yacc was doing and came to understanding that never built a simple parse before. I'm not asking them to rebuild a parser for Algol68 or C++ in a one semester course. I asking that to you take something like Dennis Allisons "tiny basic" assignment for his Stanfrodf students in the lat 1970s and ask them to build that. Peter Hibbard gave us a super small Algol-ish language, and we generated code for the "CMU Mini" (which was basically Gordon Bell's the precursor to the PDP-8 (see ISP below) - in my time the "Dragon Book was not yet written BTW. I really understood what Stev had accomplished. The interesting thing is while I tend to use yacc for most parsers, I've found myself building recursive descent parsers in a couple of cases where it seems to make better sense. Point table ... however a funny thing to consider. My father was a high school math teacher for 40 years. He noted that the loss of slide rules and trig tables made his "modern" (post-calculator) students not understand interpolation.To me, learning to use mathematical tables is a skill that never hurts. I don't even think of asking people "to walk uphill both ways to school in the snow and rain instead of riding a heated, dry yellow school bus." I am asking the student to learn foundational ideas and build skills up top of core understanding. ᐧ