[bryanlarsen]

OTOH, one of the best ways to learn something is try to use it on a language that doesn't support it. Back when I was a kid, I tried translating a Pascal quicksort from a textbook into BASIC. Those old BASIC's didn't support re-entrant functions, so I ended up having to implement my own stack. I didn't understand re-entrancy and recursion before that exercise; but certainly did afterwards! A similar later experience with a game engine in assembly language taught me a lot about object orientated designs.