reid@CTC.CONTEL.COM (Tom Reid x4505) (12/04/89)
I changed the translator writer system project in my graduate level translator course from Turbo Pascal to Modula-2 this semester with a relative minimum of problems. My motivation for changing (other than a distinct preference for Modula-2) was that Borland has changed Turbo to a proprietary, non-portable language. Because I had already required two books (a compiler plus Kim King's), I chose the shareware FST compiler. It has a Turbo-like compile/edit environment, and a very handy built-in makefile generator and make facility. Two people locked the compiler up but that was because they forgot to increase the default number of files in MSDOS. So far, the students have been mostly positive. Several dropped because they were not programmers or had skipped the prerequisites. Those left like the separate compilation and the updated statement syntax. A couple of students have ported the original handout to other Modula-2s and complained about the libraries being nonstandard. In the one-day course in Modula-2 I gave at the beginning of the semester, I stressed structuring of libraries and several students have formed a subclass triying to standardize their libraries. All-in-all, the conversion has gone well.