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Teaching program design through program structure maps

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Published:01 January 1979Publication History
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Abstract

It is well known that college and university level programs in the computing sciences continue to turn out graduates who are schooled in topics such as compiler writing, automata theory and numerical analysis, while the vast majority of potential employers of these graduates are seeking people knowledgeable in administrative systems and application programming. This point was brought home during a recent visit I made to a graduate course in data structures at a major university. When the instructor asked the more than forty students to list all the programming languages they knew, COBOL went entirely unmentioned. Although COBOL is not an ideal language for instructional purposes, the fact that it is rarely taught in computing science programs is probably due more to the tastes of instructors than to intrinsic weaknesses of COBOL. My remarks here take the position that COBOL can be used quite successfully as a demonstration language to help teach information processing principles and good programming practices, while providing students with a much sought after skill.

References

  1. 1. Ledgard, Henry F. and Cave, William C. 1976. COBOL Under Control. Communications of the ACM, V. 19, N. 11. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library

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  1. Teaching program design through program structure maps

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      • Published in

        cover image ACM SIGCSE Bulletin
        ACM SIGCSE Bulletin  Volume 11, Issue 1
        Proceedings of the 10th SIGCSE symposium on Computer science education
        February 1979
        251 pages
        ISSN:0097-8418
        DOI:10.1145/953030
        Issue’s Table of Contents
        • cover image ACM Conferences
          SIGCSE '79: Proceedings of the tenth SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
          January 1979
          251 pages
          ISBN:9781450374316
          DOI:10.1145/800126

        Copyright © 1979 ACM

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        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        • Published: 1 January 1979

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