dmd support for IDEs and the D tool chain

[Nick Sabalausky]

"BCS" <none at anon.com> wrote in message 
news:a6268ffb8018cc1e47bb9fc55e at news.digitalmars.com...
> Hello Nick,
>
>> "BCS" <none at anon.com> wrote in message
>>
>>> If mine did that I'd shoot him (a scorching e-mail :)
>>>
>> You should both feel lucky. The best I had was a class where we filled
>> in the bodies of a handful of small functions in a trivial assembler
>> (trivial meaning completely bare-minimum, and no actual lex/parse
>> theory was used) that was written by the *cough* "professor" for a
>> trivially simple fictitious CPU. And that was the *best* of the three
>> colleges I've been to.
>
> And I'm not even at a well know CS school. I'd have asked for my money 
> back.
>

Oh man, I've fought and lost many battles with schools that were enormously 
smaller then actually getting any money back. I've known *banks* that were 
more sensible about money (and hell, I'm even about ready to swear *those* 
off (I'm not referring to their investment practices)).

As far as well-known schools, yea, I've noticed too that quality and 
level-of-notoriety have basically no correlation. Around Cleveland here (for 
whatever that's worth, maybe not much I suppose), John Carroll University is 
widely considered one of the best schools in the area, has one of the 
highest sets of entrance criteria, and is overall regarded very highly. Any 
time I've ever mentioned the school's name to anyone around Cleveland, not a 
single time has the reaction ever been anything less than glowingly 
positive. Well...they let me in as a transfer (*far* easier to get in pretty 
much anywhere that way), and while I have a ton of WTF experiences about 
this place, there's one that always sticks out in my head:

One of the CS profs I had there was a PHd (well, they pretty much all were). 
But with this particular one, he openly pointed out that C was the only 
language he knew. Which might not normally be so bad (although I'd at least 
consider it questionable), but...On one of the two or three programming 
assignments in the class (they were all in C and no more than about a 
hundred lines max), I had to fill a statically-allocated buffer with some 
string input from a network connection, echo it to stdout, repeat until the 
input was exhausted, and exit (yea, not exactly a taxing assignment - and 
keep in mind, this wasn't an intro or even a lower-division class, this was 
upper-division). Ok, so I figured, "Obviously, the input length isn't 
guaranteed to be a multiple of my buffer size, so when I get the final chunk 
I'd better toss a \0 at the end so my output doesn't include any garbage 
data from the previous iteration." Turned it in. Few days layer when I got 
it back, I got a bad grade, and he had marked that \0 I added as "This won't 
work". (I had tested it, of course.) I just assumed he had simply graded too 
fast and goofed, so I pointed it out to him and explained the problem. He 
looked again, studied it, and went "Nope, that won't work." I questioned 
some more, figuring there must be some *other* bug he was referring to that 
I just hadn't noticed and that just happened to have worked out by pure luck 
(it's certainly been known to happen in C). But the more we discussed it, 
the more I realized: This joker didn't have the slightest clue how 
null-terminated strings worked!

Obviously that would be fine for a Java programmer, or C#, Python, D, etc., 
but here was this guy who didn't understand one of the most basic concepts 
in what he himself admits is the only language he knows...and not only does 
some group of idiots actually give him a PHd in CS, but some other idiots 
actually hire him to teach it at an allegedly "very good school". Of course, 
I *am* well aware there's a big distinction between programming and computer 
science...but this was was just plain ridiculous. You can't call someone a 
handyman if they've studied a million books on the subject but don't know 
how to work a screwdriver.

And that was just one of many contradictions to John Carroll's alleged 
quality. Don't get me started on their Sociology dept. And the 
students...oh, man...I swear I am not exaggerating even the slightest bit 
when I say that most of them were, without a doubt, among the absolute 
stupidest people I've ever met in my life (and to top it off, they had the 
personalities of dry sponges). And yet, this school was known to have fairly 
strict entrance criteria. The whole place was so pathetic I pretty much just 
"checked-out" most of my third semester there and then left for a different 
place (which had a whole other set of...dysfunctions, to put it *very* 
mildly...).

The school I had gone to before that was well-known as a party school 
(BGSU), and as awful as it was, it was actually *better* than the 
well-respected JCU in almost every way.