From: abs0@coos.dartmouth.edu (Kelvin Leung)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.hongkong
Subject: Re: HK High School CS syllabus
Date: 15 Oct 92 23:24:38 GMT
Organization: Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH

anw1@cec2.wustl.edu (Aaron Wong) writes:

[a lot of reasons why BASIC isn't good enough for HK highschool's CS classes
 deleted]

Before we come to a conclusion that BASIC isn't a good enough language
to use in the classroom, let's trace back to the history of the language.

1) How BASIC was introduced.

BASIC was introduced in the 50-70s, by two professors at a small college.
They believe in making computers more accessible to their students.  
Therefore, they (along with a group of undergraduates) created BASIC,
the computer language.  It has a lot of merits. In particular, it
reduces a lot of things which other languages have to deal with--so that
the students can spend more time dealing with the problem than programming.

2) How come BASIC became so popular.
   A reduced interpreter BASIC can be used on a microcomputer with 4KB of
 main memory.  Bill Gates of Microsoft, for instance, managed to fit it
into Altos (sp?)--and make it one of the most widely used computer languages
available on microcomputers today.  The original BASIC was much more 
sophiscated, (and had gone through several phrases of changes) but had
been reduced to use on microcomputers.  I bring up Bill Gates because
he (and his company) is primarily responsible for making BASIC so popular.
And by doing so, he also changed certain things which made his versions
of BASIC different from the original BASIC created by the two professors.

Incidentally, there is an ANSI standard BASIC set by the profs. 
However, Microsoft and
many vendors have come up with different forms of BASIC, which don't
necessarily follow the guidelines of ANSI BASIC.

Just so people don't think I am lying, you could ask those two professors
yourself.  I know at least one of them still have access to internet.
The other has retired, so I don't know what he is doing nowadays.  If people
want one of their addresses, I can dig it up.

Last but not least, HK high school's "CS" curriculum doesn't stress too much
on programming.  Therefore, teaching a student to program is not the
fundamental purpose.  During the two school years, they will have to learn the
history of computers, computer architectures and terminology.  Do you really
think we should teach the kids two computer languages and various algorithms
on top of the already dense syllabus??

>Aaron Wong

Yours Sincerely,
Kelvin
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