A really bad idea.

[Jon Bills]

Chad Netzer wrote:
> On Friday 15 November 2002 05:31, Andrew Koenig wrote:
>
>> Simon> Yeah there's plenty of nice things in the STL, but it's a
>> Simon> library, not part of the language.
>>
>> The distinction isn't particularly important.
>
> True, but I think the original point in the thread was that in
> describing Python, you have to almost immediately talk about tuples,
> lists, and dictionaries, since they are so important to the core
> language (argument passing, multiple argument returns, introspection
> of objects, namespaces, etc.), as well as being immediately useful
>  builtin datatypes for programmers. With C++, you can get away with
> not discussing many of the standard library containers, until after
> you have discussed references, pointers, call-by-value vs.
> call-by-ref, etc.

That might be technically true, but its not very useful. You would be doing
a newcomer to C++ an injustice by not teaching the mechanisms which allow
them to build useful programs easily, regardless of whether those mechanisms
exist in the language or standard library. This leads me to believe the
distinction between language and library, at least in this context, is not
very valuable.

Jon.