>George, you make a good point re the importantance of understanding something about the OS when learning to program. I've been away from academia for some time now, but when I taught programming the low-level language class was IBM 360 assembler; it was considered the "cut class" by most students and profs since it separated the contenders from the pretenders, and those who did well in it went on to be the better students in the higher-level language classes. So I agree: C or BASIC to learn the fundamentals of programming, C++ to learn OOP, then on to VFP for real productivity in developing data-centric apps.

Hi Rick,

Well, I taught myself BASIC, then 6502 assembler. One thing during this time that I did was to obtain the source code (in assembler) for both the BASIC interpreter and DOS (this was on an Atari computer). I also had a memory map for the machine. I consider the time I spent studying these time well spent. It gave me an understanding of what went on "underneath the hood". I also had the opportunity to communicate with one of the authors of both the BASIC and DOS.

I then went back to school (Kennesaw State University). There the "cut" class was the third in the "Programming Principles" series (CS 222 at the time). It dealt with pointers, recursion, binary trees, etc. 75% of the people who started it, dropped it (I was one of the survivors< g >).