• Minotaur@lemm.ee
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    8 months ago

    I’m very much guessing that this is just supposed to be a type of pseudocode given the context and vagueness of it.

    It’s a big reason why I really dont like pseudocode as instruction to people learning the basics of what programming is. It made more sense 20 years ago when programming languages were on a whole a lot more esoteric and less plain text, but now with simple languages like Python there’s simply little reason to not just write Python code or whatever.

    I took an intro to programming class in College and the single thing I got dinged on the most is “incorrect pseudocode”, which was either too formal and close to real code or too casual and close to plain English.

    It’s not a great system. We really need to get rid of it as a practice

    • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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      8 months ago

      Reminds me of 7th grade math class, chapter on estimating. Assignment was “Estimate the following values” with problems like 42+28=? or 14*3=?

      One of them was 6*7=? Which having memorized my times tables in 4th grade like they told me to, I knew off the top of my head that it’s 42. I wrote that. And it was marked wrong because I was too precise.

    • psud@aussie.zone
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      8 months ago

      In the 90s my high school used Pascal. That seems reasonable if you only want to teach procedural