494 karma · joined August 26, 2010
/* Est c consonans (non vocalis, non spatium, non littera non-Latina)? */
seems a word-by-word translation of English words into Latin words ignoring the structure and syntax of classical Latin. Perhaps it ought to be something more like: /* Estne c litera consonans (neque vocalis, neque spatium, neque litera linguae aliae)?
edit: On reflection, notes on the return values of boolean functions probably ought to be some sort of utrum ...an construction.It seems like you've just moved the cheating problem from one organization to a different organization? How would this new certificate authority measure learning better than universities are currently measuring learning? Are there examples of such certificate authorities existing now? Do they also have cheating problems?
A search of the interned didn't turn up what I was looking for, but I'm very new at hardware work. Perhaps newer chips have such tight timing requirements that you can't work with them without using a SOC?
> "If filiae is nominative, how would you translate the sentence?"
or
> What cases could agricolae be here?
if you want to introduce the context sensitivity of the grammar.
Unfortunately, in the first declension, the nominative plural, genitive singular, and and dative singular all look identical, hence the confusion here. Filiae and agricolae could be any of those three options, which means, as you rightly say, that we need context to render the sentence. That introduced students to another distinctive feature of Latin: like C++, Latin has a context sensitive grammar.
If you wanted to separate the introduction of the case system from the introduction of the context sensitivity of the grammar, you could do this sentence:
> Filiabus aquam agricolae dant.
While that fixes most of the context sensitivity, it doesn't fix all of it, and introduces an irregular declension, also tough right out the gate.
Latin is a hard language to teach.
The Greeks also had very different rules awarding time for sea combat and land combat (rooted in Homer). In land combat, the model was Achilles, and stratagems and tricks detracted from the time of a victory, while in sea combat, the model was Odysseus, and metis ruled, so strategems and tricks were in bounds, hence the glory of Themistocles.
It's not, like, rocket science, but it's not trivial either.
It's not three pages long in Clarke (nor in Heath), and either way, the argument is only 10 statements long.
> But the reader who takes the trouble to decode the proposition will see that it is trivial primary school arithmetic.
This is also not super obvious from Clarke or Heath. I'd love to know how the author would render this proposition trivial to a fourth grader.
To be sure, the mathematics of Euclid is a very foreign country from what's commonly taught in schools today. But Newton's thought is firmly rooted in that foreign country.
The changing of the rules is good preparation for scientific study where our understanding actually changes over time and we have to internalize new models regularly. I taught my chemistry students that quarks only combine in pairs or triplets, until one year Fermilab released evidence that quarks combine in quartets and quintets while I was teaching the unit. How could I avoid telling my students that what I'd taught them before was incorrect? Literally no one knew. So the practice of revising our ideas has utility.
It seems elsewhere in the thread that you don't consider it lying if one gives a general disclaimer that models aren't perfect, but I wonder whether or not that general disclaimer wouldn't inoculate the idea that multiplication is repeated addition? It's an imperfect model that super useful for all the numbers available to students when they learn what multiplication is. And I wonder further whether there's not an implicit disclaimer that what you're learning isn't the final word inherent in the structure of the educational system?
A secondary advantage is that the tools are so wonderfully simple. On the first day we introduce ls, touch, nano, and cc. That's all you need to write your first program. The tool reference fits on one page. And that toolchain will do right by you for anything up to about a kiloline, and in an introductory course, that's about the biggest thing you'll write. So there's no more mussing with tooling. You can focus on algorithms and data structures.
A tertiary advantage is that it forces (and allows) the students to muck around with unix in a way that's oddly less threatening than a graphical user interface. Eventually they start rooting around in /etc and /var and /bin, and learn a whole lot about how computers are organized. So there's some serendipitous learning as well.