[PRL] A Picture of Language - NYTimes.com

[Matthias Felleisen]

On Mar 27, 2012, at 2:16 PM, John Clements wrote:

> 
> On Mar 27, 2012, at 5:01 AM, Mitchell Wand wrote:
> 
>> The origin of sentence diagramming.
> 
> Related question: should first-year programming students be able to "diagram" their code? Specifically, should they be able to identify all nested expressions?


My first programming course required (1) reading and understanding the Algol 60 report grammar and (2) being able to 'parse' an Algol program (if you have seen the back of the Pascal report, you know what I mean). Evaluation problems were done by example -- no real rules.