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>> I find your question difficult to answer, because students learning
>> programming should be taught never to write a program if they can reuse
>> one that already exists and meets all the requirements.
>I think that it is not true. Students learning software engineering should
>be taught the idea of software reuse; students learning programming should
>be encouraged to re-write programs anew even if existing ones meet all
>requirements.
I'll second that. In the New York University graduate program, a course in
compilers was required, and the homework assignments all added up to writing
a simplified C compiler in C. I doubt if anyone went on to do that in a
professional environment, but I learned a great deal about parsing, the
appropriate data structures, etc. that have all helped in my XML and other
text processing work. (Just don't ask me to remember what LALR stands for.)
Even software engineering students will better understand the issues
involved in selecting and hooking together the appropriate modules if
they've built a few basic modules from scratch. It's a valuable exercise.
Bob
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