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> If the student could understand pointers they would succeed, if not they wouldn't. What were common hang-ups that people had with pointers? I guess, it's sa
by hirvi74 5y ago
> If the student could understand pointers they would succeed, if not they wouldn't.
What were common hang-ups that people had with pointers?
I guess, it's safe to assume I am of a younger generation than you, but I may have had a bit of an unfair advantage (compared to my peers) when I dabbled with C because I studied assembly (x86 and a bit of ARM) prior to C, so pointers weren't exactly foreign concepts.
I do not think about this on a daily basis, so it's easy for me to forget how good things are these days. I can't tell you the last time I even thought about/used pointers, since I mainly use the fancy "magic under the hood" languages these days. For pure geeky fun, assembly and C were my favorites... Something about the memory management and pain brings back fond memories, even if I never made anything overtly special with them.
- digisign 5y agoAs developers know, pointers require you to work with a variable that points to another variable. It is one more level of indirection, and one needs to keep additional information in short-term memory to understand the code. For whatever reason, a significant portion of students can't deal with it and give up. At the time, there were no "CSS expert" type of jobs to focus on instead. Perhaps Excel jockey or IT management as mentioned, but a different major entirely. Perhaps one reason is that the traditional C syntax for it is rather cryptic. Personally, first learned it in (Turbo) Pascal, which I found easy to learn (with its ^ syntax), and with that made learning it in C easier later.