A programming language for teaching data structures and algorithms with? [closed]

Posted by Andreas Grech on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Andreas Grech
Published on 2010-06-10T15:24:27Z Indexed on 2010/06/10 15:32 UTC
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subjective

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algorithm

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data-structures

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education

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teaching

Possible Duplicate:
Choice of programming language for learning data structures and algorithms

Teachers have different opinions on what programming language they would choose to teach data structures and algorithms with.

Some would prefer a lower level language such as C because it allows the student to learn more about what goes on beyond the abstractions in terms of memory allocation and deallocation and pointers and pointer arithmetic.

On the other hand, others would say that they would prefer a higher level language like Java because it allows the student to learn more about the concepts of the structures and the algorithm design rather than 'waste time' and fiddle around with memory segmentation faults and all the blunders that come with languages where memory management is manual.

What is your take on this issue? And also, please post any references you may know of that also discuss this argument.

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