My first teacher

[Dilowaran]

Tell us what was your first teacher.

[User137]

Teacher for pascal language? Sadly i never had any But i was able to try fun things with turbo pascal back when DOS was mainly used, and Windows 3.0 was brand new. Was about age of 6...

[SilverWarior]

If you are thinking of a person than my answer would be noone. I started learning pascal by myself.
If you are thinking in general my answer would be Delphi 6 documentation, and the demos wich come with Delphi.

[Ingemar]

I did have one, and the teaching was awful. Well, not the CS teaching as such but the stupid idea of teaching us "classic" Pascal which was really, really obsolete and limited. We were not allowed to use obvious things like variable length strings or even units. We could fail the exam if we wrote modern code! Pure madness. Later, I discovered the greatness of the modernized forms of the language, by myself.

[LP]

I learned Pascal by myself when first used it on a machine that was something in between of ZX Spectrum and C64; back then it was highly advanced compared to its Basic companion. It was a sort of prototype of language and compiler as its syntax was quite weird, I think, it was even case-sensitive. Later on, re-learned Turbo Pascal 3 and then moved to TP5 on my brand new 386-40 Mhz IBM PC, which was also a hell of machine on its own (for me, after using some crappy XTs and 286, it was a dream computer ).

I did have one, and the teaching was awful. Well, not the CS teaching as such but the stupid idea of teaching us "classic" Pascal which was really, really obsolete and limited. We were not allowed to use obvious things like variable length strings or even units. We could fail the exam if we wrote modern code! Pure madness.

First, AFAIR, the original Pascal specification had strings in it. Second, I think your teacher was on good track. You learn more when there are more restrictions, which you need to overcome. Sure, you would probably liked that the language, compiler and/or your teacher would do the entire homework for you, but you will not learn anything this way. In a learning process sometimes you need to start with pure basics. After all, if you can't handle the lack of strings (which, in other languages, such as C/C++ simply don't exist), how are you going to handle more complex tasks?

I for one would really appreciate to have a teacher back then to teach me Pascal, no matter how rudimentary or restricted it would have been.

[Ingemar]

First, AFAIR, the original Pascal specification had strings in it. Second, I think your teacher was on good track. You learn more when there are more restrictions, which you need to overcome. Sure, you would probably liked that the language, compiler and/or your teacher would do the entire homework for you, but you will not learn anything this way. In a learning process sometimes you need to start with pure basics. After all, if you can't handle the lack of strings (which, in other languages, such as C/C++ simply don't exist), how are you going to handle more complex tasks?

I for one would really appreciate to have a teacher back then to teach me Pascal, no matter how rudimentary or restricted it would have been.

The big damage they did was to convince all students that Pascal was a toy language. No information about modern dialects. That is unforgivable. Giving specific tasks that should be dealt with under limitations is another thing, that can be useful.