In article <3b0e529c@news.povray.org> , Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg>  wrote:

>   I personally still think that it would be better to first get
> accustomed with programming (that is, you don't need to search in a book
> what was the syntax of a function or a for-loop) and get some experience
> before trying to handle a huge program. Better start with small programs
> (like a program which prints all prime numbers between 1 and 1000 and such),
> then write a bit bigger ones before even trying to patch a huge program.
> It will save a lot of time in the long run and the patch will probably be
> much better and efficient. If you start coding the patch from the scratch,
> with no experience at all, you'll probably make things in 50 lines which
> could be made in 5 lines much more efficiently and with a lot less trouble and
> work.

I completely agree with you!

I still have tons of such code in my mailbox from people (8-10 of about 30)
who took an intro to data structures class (I was the teaching assistant)
and came up with 82 lines and three while-loops (in C) to reverse a doubly
linked list.  Then there are the "better" solutions that need one while-loop
and a function that returns the nth element (a second while-loop).  And this
in university (first year of course) so they were at least told what is
wrong with their code...

I don't want to discourage anybody.  You just should know that nobody can
learn programming in a day, week or even year.  The syntax (0.1%), yes, but
there is a lot more behind it (99.9%).  After five or ten years there will
still be things left to learn!

    Thorsten

____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

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