Hi Arnold, I'm not sure Java might be the best start, either, although it is widely popular. In our Uni in Finland Java is used mostly procedurally and there's a separate course on object oriented programming, also in Java. The authors of how to Think like a Computer Scientist, the PYthon edition. argue that one of the strong points of multi-paradigm langs is that you don't have to cover objects first. They clame it is hard to teach object first, since to really understand them one needs knowledge of variables and scope, functions, operators, parameters and all the OO jargon for relatively non-magical things. WIth a multi paradigm language hello world is just like: puts "hello world" Or something like that, and you can start with very simple procedural concepts, and cover functions, objects etc... when people are ready to tacle them. I still recall trying to understand OOp from a procedural background and all this talk of objects sending messages to each other and having contracts just threw me off. But statements like basic objects are just like structs with syntactic sugar for calling functions taking structs, and no direct access to struct members allowed, are closer to a procedural programmer mind set, and are more descriptive, too. There's even a book about object oriented programming in c, though I wouldn't start with C. Perl's object orientation heavily relies on procedural concepts and references, too, but Perl is a bit too specialized to start with I'd say e.g. no separate float, string and int handling, plus abnormally strong string processing in the core. I'd start out with a conventional, statically and strongly typed language at any case, since it is, in my view, easier to see some advantages of both static and dynamic typing, if you have learned static typing first. but that's just my experience, I'm just a student. -- With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä (vtatila@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming: http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila Arnold Bailey wrote: >Hi all, > >Jared had my intentions right. I only meant to use it as a very basic tool >for interactive use to show a first time middle schooler what a program is. >It is the interactive use that is a plus. My scenario doesn't require >indentation, etc. After that first session I am using Java. __________ View the list's information and change your settings at //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind