On 4/5/2012 8:28 AM, Michael Veksler wrote:
It is not that they can't remember. I am a TA at a moderately basic
programming course,
and student submit home assignments with horrible errors. These errors,
such as
free(*str) or *str=malloc(n) are easily be caught by -Wall. I have to
remember to
advise them to use -Wall and to fix all the warnings, which I sometimes
forget to do.
Wouldn't it be better in a "moderately basic programming course" to
provide standard canned scripts that set things up nicely for students
including the switches they need? Indeed for such a course wouldn't it
be better to use an appropriate IDE, so they could concentrate on the
task at hand and not fiddling with commands. Yes, I think it is very
important for students to learn what is going on, but you can't do
everything at once in a basic course.
And even in the context you give, surely it is not too much to expect
a TA to remember important advice like this?