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Re: peasant revolt against DrScheme!



Michael Vanier wrote:

> Side note: a course that taught students scheme, then C/C++, then linking
> them together would be very cool and eminently practical.  Students would
> probably hate it, though :-)

My wife taught a related course last semester.  See software
engineering at Worcester Poly:

  http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~kfisler/Courses/CS3733/

She taught the course in Scheme (!).  One of the key assignments was
an individual project where every student had to interface to code
written in C.  Every SE course should do this!

Anyway, she gave them a binary decision diagram package written in C
-- a good illustration of the need for interoperability, because you
couldn't reimplement this in Scheme -- and had them write a small
Scheme boolean simplifier/calculator using the underlying data
structures.  Students had to write adaptors where necessary.  The
trickiest part of the assignment was to manage memory, which is done
in vastly different ways at the two levels.

I'll let her comment on it further if she cares.

Shriram