This paper examines the question of the programming language to be used in introductory computin g courses . It is found that there are three distinct groups of students that have to be catered for in introductory courses : the "casual user", the "general user", and the "professional user" . The manner i n which the introductory courses fit into the student's curriculum are examined next and an analogy is developed between "structured programming" and teaching . This analogy is used to draw conclusions concernin g the descriptive properties of the pedagogic language to be used . Issues concerning the modularity of bot h data and procedure structures are reviewed and the emergence of programming languages specifically designe d to enhance their descriptive powers in this area is noted . It is concluded that there is a need for a pedagogic language that can be used in all courses in which the computer is an object of study and that th e most commonly used languages, namely, FORTRAN and PL/I fail to meet the requirements deduced in this paper . At the present time, Pascal is the only widely known language that can be considered for this role .
Abstract.Pyramids, a new data structure for the representation of matrices, are introduced. The motivation for this is Strassen's algorithm for matrix multiplication. The basic operations for pyramids are described in Pascal.
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