"Bill Ogden" wrote in message
...
Back in the dark ages, when I was in school, we were "encouraged" to take a
numerical analysis course if we were interested in computers. (I was an EE
major.) It was not an easy topic, but it made us well aware of the
difference between correct results and computational precision. I was
recently astonished to find that most computer science students have no
concept of this area and even less interest in it.

Realistically 90+% of CS students are going to end up in jobs programming web
pages, databases, and other applications where it just isn't going to matter.
There just isn't time in the curriculum these days to cover everything... For
that matter, these days something like understanding the effects of finite
precision in integer arithmetic and how it relates to fixed point DSP
calcuations is probably applicable to a larger number of students!

(OK, ok, I'd be the first to admit that college courses have been dumbed down
over the years as well, but this is a direct reflection of the fact that
industry just doesn't _think_ they need that many engineers who DO know the
'hard core' bits...)

These current thoughts extend to other areas:

- C is more accurate than Fortran (or Basic, or what whatever)

Arbitrary statement (on the student's part).

- Obtaining "stable" numeric results means you get the same answer if
you run the program twice

Ditto.

- C produces the fastest programs

There is some truth to this, perhaps if only because so much more work (as far
as I can tell) has been done on C optimiziers than for other languages.
Perhaps a better statement would be, "With novice programmers, C tends to
produce the fastest programs."

- if C is good then C++ is better

C++ does have a lot of nice benefits over regular old C. The last time I
programmed in FORTRAN it was FORTRAN 77, but I can only imagine that FORTRAN
90 has some nice improvements over FORTRAN 77 as well. (And Delphi is
purpoertedly a nice improvement to Pascal, etc...)

- Using all the obscure C operators produces a better program

Uggh.

---Joel