On Thursday, July 4, 2002, at 02:03  PM, Kevin Fisher wrote:
> In my first year of university, our "programming fundamentals" course 
> was
> taught with an imaginary language.  There was no compiler for it, it 
> only
> existed in the professor's mind (and our nightmares, but that's another
> story).  We'd first design everything in this imaginary language, and 
> THEN
> we'd translate it to another language (In our case, FORTRAN-77...yes, 
> this
> was in 1990 believe it or not).
>
We did this for several (many) years at Georgia Tech.  The problem was 
motivation.  How motivating is it to write lines of code that no one 
ever sees executes?  How can one leverage students' interest in 
computational media (including video games) if the programs are always 
imaginary?

Mark