Hi guys

[RachelR]

Just a little Introduction about me.

I am a Computer Sceince student at the University of Kent at Canterbury and am back for some resit exams. I shall be starting a placement soon at IDR http://www.idrsolutions.com/ from the 1st September

My website is at http://www40.brinkster.com/rachelreid/

I have noctunal absence seizures and am currently taking 1750mg of Keppra

[RachelR]

My picture is a bit outdated, but I am away from my own PC so will update this as soon as I am back on my own PC

[RachelR]

By the way, I've noticed you are 8 hours behind me because its now 11.03 GMT

[Bernard]

Yep! Hi Rachel, welcome to the forum.

Congratulations on your (pending?) graduation and job. I've got a degree in CS myself. I enjoy programming. Did you specialize in any particular programming languages?

BTW, my wife, Stacy, was able to completely eliminate her absense seizures with EEG neurofeedback. Even after the tonic clonic seizures, atonics and "jerks" (myoclonics) returned post child delivery, the absense seizures never returned.

[RachelR]

I'm currently resitting three second year modules (have resat 2, 1 more to go) and our course is quite mixed.

http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/

In the first year we did an introductory course to Java, Haskell, Databases including SQL, and this year we've done more advance Java and Haskell (GUI's and graphics), Networks, C and Occam.

At the beginning of next month, I will be working for a small Java company (IDR in Tonbridge, Kent (see signature for their website)) and thats a 1 year placement between the second and third year and I will hopefully graduate in 2007.

What programming languages do you speialise in?

Mine are Java, HTML and SQL (although I've done all the ones above)

[Bernard]

I mostly program in basic and assembly these days, although I have used C, Pascal, Ada, Lisp, and about 10 other obscure languages. I've tinkered with PHP too.

[RachelR]

Sounds cool.

Which is your favourite?

I've seen assembler in my Electronics lectures but never programmed in it. Is it a low level langauge?

Ada is a language used in concurrency isn't it because we studied Occam which belongs to the same family and our lecturer kept referring to Ada?

What kind of a language is Pascal? Is it a functional language?

[Bernard]

Assembler is as low as you can go without handcoding 0s and 1s into a binary file with a HEX editor. I enjoy writing small routines in assembler for maximum optimiztion. It's too low level to make application development practical though, IMO. You can d/l MASM32 from Hutch's site if you want to experiment with it:

http://www.movsd.com/

Ada is mostly used these days by the US governement and academia. I don't know of a single private sector company that uses it.

I cannot believe that you are in the second year of school for Computer Science and don't know what Pascal is! It was designed originally to be a teaching language.

The History of Computer Programming Languages

[RachelR]

I've heard of Pascal, but our department thinks its too outdated so doensn't even bother teaching it. I wasn't sure what classification of programming language e.g. Java is Object Oriented, C is procedural, Occam and Ada are concurrency, Haskell and Erlang are functional.

The link looks interesting and we've covered that in an Electronics module this year.

[RachelR]

I know that the higher the level of programming, the less work for the programmer but more work for the processor and compiler and vice versa.

[Bernard]

Borland's Delphi is a modern implementation of Pascal.

[RachelR]

I'll have to have a look at it sometime.

It may have been a better language to teach us than Haskell.