>>>>> "Per" == Per Bothner <xxxxxx@bothner.com> writes:

Per> xxxxxx@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de (Michael Sperber [Mr. Preprocessor]) writes:

>> Definitely.  I just taught this stuff to 250 beginning students last
>> week, and many had been confused by the obscurity in programming
>> languages they had learned before.

Per> An equally plausible explanation is that they were not taught
Per> (properly) the concepts of references (lvalues) and the concept of
Per> pass-by-value.

Well, yeah, exactly.  The point is that it is being made harder to
teach by that obscurity introduced by the overloading of SET! (or = or
whatever it's called in their favorite programming language).

Per> I find it inelegant to use two forms where one is a
Per> generalization of other other, and the latter is just as
Per> convenient.

But it makes explicit a conceptual difference people need to
understand anyway which is a good thing.  Overloading could collapse a
lot of procedures and special forms into one in just about any
language, but that doesn't make the idea inherently elegant.

--
Cheers =8-} Mike
Friede, Völkerverständigung und überhaupt blabla