Re: Free C++compilers for a classroom
On Sep 26, 4:14 pm, "Alf P. Steinbach" <al...@start.no> wrote:
* James Kanze:
On Sep 25, 3:45 pm, "Alf P. Steinbach" <al...@start.no> wrote:
* James Kanze:
Presumably, as they're students, they're not allowed to use a
debugger.
It seems you mean: it's almost a given that a modern learning
institution forbids the students learning anything about the craft
they're supposed to learn.
The craft that they are supposed to be learning is how to write
correct programs. Debuggers certainly aren't any use for that;
They are very much use for that, yes.
Because in order to write correct programs you need to
understand what's going on, and in my experience a good
debugger helps the students enormously with that.
To write correct programs, you have to understand what's going
on before the code is written. You can't use a debugger on code
that hasn't been written yet.
Debuggers can be useful for understanding poorly written and
poorly documented existing code. But that's not normally what
students are concerned with. They're supposed to be learning
how to write good code; by banning the debugger, you remove the
crutch which allows them to get by without understanding what
they are doing.
My students, at vocational school and college level, were not
steered away from debuggers, but the opposite. However, at
college level this practical approach eventually required a
hierarchy of lab assistants, older students earning a few
bucks. It's a question of organizing.
they normally are only used once the program is known to be
incorrect.
I think you mean, by professionals.
Actually, I meant by students. Professionals use them mostly
for legacy code, or code from some outside source, which isn't
correctly documented or cleanly written. They can be of
enormous help there. The professionals I know don't use them at
all for the code they write themselves. (In many of the places
I've worked, there hasn't even been a debugger available. And
nobody missed them.)
But no, that's not the case either, but I think it depends on
the quality of the tools. I probably would not have used gdb
to check or figure out the system's documentation, but some
other debuggers are great tools in that respect.
If you have to check and figure out documentation, a debugger
can be a valuable asset. Even gdb. But I think you'd agree
that if the documentation requires checking and figuring out,
that's a problem in itself. We certainly don't want to teach
students that they should write documentation that needs
checking and figuring out, or even that they can get away with
it. It's precisely because this is the major use of a debugger
that I would generally ban its use by students.
--
James Kanze (GABI Software) email:james.kanze@gmail.com
Conseils en informatique orient=E9e objet/
Beratung in objektorientierter Datenverarbeitung
9 place S=E9mard, 78210 St.-Cyr-l'=C9cole, France, +33 (0)1 30 23 00 34