>
> Dear Stephan,
>
> > > For the class I have in mind, there are no corner cases, just concepts and
> > > basic practice. They are not going to be db developers, not even computer
> >
> > So no string comparisons? I know that's a mostly unused corner case and
> > all, but... ;)
>
> They survive to the idea that text/date/... are "basic" types in SQL.
> Maybe I'm lucky... they could prefer java references with new/equals...;-)
>
> If I take your example about details of && vs AND semantics, while
> teaching "programming concepts" I'm not going to discuss the fact that &&
> is shortcut by the evaluator, as this is very specific.
>
> I'm not planing my students to know what "i=++i+i++;" could mean.
And I wouldn't expect that in a programming concepts course. But, if
you're going to (for example) say that, "preincrement and postincrement
work exactly as in C," you've got to realize that there's a chance a
student will know that the i++ + ++i is undefined and expect it to be
undefined in the language you're talking about. That's the problem with
using shorthand phrases like "exactly in <X>" without the "except ..."