checking if a list is empty

[harrismh777]

Ian Kelly wrote:
>> >>  Well, at least Haskell is probably better as an introductory language
>> >>  than Lisp or Scheme.  But what schools actually do this?
>>


http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/inf1/fp/

http://www.cs.ou.edu/~rlpage/fpclassSpring97/


There are lots of these...   the two above afaik are still doing this at 
the entry level...    ... supposedly, these kids are 'mostly' successful 
and exit interviews are great...  but that doesn't fit with the observed 
idea that students are not doing well in comp sci classes generally... 
but, read below...  this at the entry level??

====== block quote =========
The first 10 to 11 weeks of the course use Haskell. Students are 
required to write nine programs in Haskell, three of which are team 
projects that combine software developed in individual projects. 
Different members of a team are assigned different individual projects, 
and the team efforts combine their solutions into a working piece of 
software.

In the early part of the course, students use operators like map, foldr, 
zip, and iterate to express computations. Explicit recursion is 
introduced after some experience with these common patterns of 
computation. Examples and problems address non-numeric applications, for 
the most part. Both interactive and file I/O are covered, but general 
purpose monads are not.

The last 5 to 6 weeks of the course use C, and most of the projects in 
that part of the course duplicate the function of earlier pieces of 
software that the students have written in Haskell.
====== /block quote =========