[comp.theory] "Models of Computation" course cancelled

rst@cs.hull.ac.uk (Rob Turner) (11/20/90)

The "Models of Computation" course I brought up recently has now been
cancelled (postponed?) by persons higher up in the department than
myself.

This has not been caused by any response from netnews articles
since those responsible for its demise do not read netnews. Basically,
we were trying to review the entire Computer Science syllabus, and we
thought that there might be a place for a course of this nature,
regardless of the title (which could have been changed).

My role in the course would have been to teach the operational
semantics. This was not my idea, but was suggested by someone else. I
still think that it would be a good idea to have a course teaching the
different programming "paradigms" (even though I use it, I hate the
abuse of that word; it has been completely hijacked by the computer
community and is used in a different way than the definition my Oxford
English dictionary gives me: has this ever been discussed before on
Usenet? I would like to see the arguments.) in context, rather than an
isolated view of many assorted programming languages which most
courses of this type seem to contain.

Rob

------------------------------------------------------------------
Robert Turner                      |   rst@cs.hull.ac.uk
Department of Computer Science     |
University of Hull                 | "In every real man a child is
Hull HU6 7RX                       |  hidden that wants to play"
England                            |  - Nietzsche