4 ms·
Somewhat related, my introductory classes involved a lot of games around pre- and post- increments and short circuiting. While I get that understanding these op
by angleofrepose 7y ago
Somewhat related, my introductory classes involved a lot of games around pre- and post- increments and short circuiting. While I get that understanding these operations is fundamentally important, is understanding ridiculous combinations of them important? I mean, these were the basis of large portions of some quizzes and midterms. I get playing with them from a theoretical perspective, as this can literally be done in many languages, but why force freshmen to play this deep mental gymnastics? Maybe a play at making the classes weeder classes and no other reason.
- pvg 7y agoI don't know how convoluted the questions on your midterms were but one good reason that kind of irritating thing pops up in tests is that it's quite common in real world C code. Think of the old K&R string copy example.
- rayiner 7y agoThe questions are testing whether you really understand the basic rules of the language. Often times, the best way to test whether you really get the rules is to raise them in some odd context, so that you can’t just pattern match to figure out the result.