Re: teaching Java and formal grammars

From:
ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram)
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.java.programmer
Date:
19 Jul 2012 14:07:54 GMT
Message-ID:
<Java-20120719160010@ram.dialup.fu-berlin.de>
Patricia Shanahan <pats@acm.org> writes:

I am not sure hours of instruction are the important thing for
programming language learning. How much time are the students able and
willing to spend outside class?


  No time. The classes are visited by employees, pupils, and
  students, who need or want to use the rest of their time
  for their job/life, school, or university. When I tried to
  give homework, it was never done.

I wonder whether the Java and EBNF could be taught in parallel without
causing confusion. For example, teach enough Java to write a very simple
application, then show a simplified extract of the Java grammar that is
sufficient to derive the applications the students now know how to write.


  Yes, I tried this. From the beginning I only showed a
  simplified grammar restricted to the parts that are actually
  used in class, but even that was too hard. But maybe I'll
  try ?railroad diagrams? as used in Pascal. It should make
  clear that this is not intended to become a part of Java
  source code.

  For example, the curly braces: Some of my students don't
  even know the German name of the character ?{? when they
  come into my class. It seems they never encountered this
  symbol before in their life. Suddenly they see it in both
  Java and EBNF with two totally different meanings. That
  seems to be too much.

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