• OneCardboardBox@lemmy.sdf.org
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    7 months ago

    Reminds me of an early Uni project where we had to operate on data in an array of 5 elements, but because “I didn’t teach it to everyone yet” we couldn’t use loops. It was going to be a tedious amount of copy-paste.

    I think I got around it by making a function called “not_loop” that applied a functor argument to each element of the array in serial. Professor forgot to ban that.

    • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
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      7 months ago

      but because “I didn’t teach it to everyone yet” we couldn’t use loops.

      That is aggravating. “I didn’t teach the class the proper way to do this task, so you have to use the tedious way.” What is the logic behind that other than wasting everyone’s time?

      • skulblaka@startrek.website
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        7 months ago

        Teaching someone the wrong way to do something frequently makes the right way make way more sense. Someone who just copy/pasted 99 near identical if statements understands on a fundamental level when, why, and where you use a for loop much more than someone who just read in the textbook “a for loop is used to iterate elements in a collection”.

        • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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          7 months ago

          Reminds me of a dude that wrote the equivalent of this in Visualg (a brazilian pseudocode language and program, meant solely for teaching programming)

          if
            if
              if
                if
                  if (x < 10) then
                    print(x)
                  else
                else
              else
            else
          else
          

          That the thing ran and didn’t complain about the amount of loose/needless if’s checking fuck all baffles my mind to this day.

        • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
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          7 months ago

          And if I know the right way of doing it I already understand why it’s better because I want to use it in this situation. Making the students who already understand the lesson do it the wrong way is just a waste of their time.