boris@charon.mit.edu (Boris N Goldowsky) (04/10/88)
One nice thing about Forth for learning is that you get instant
feedback - no need to compile the whole program before you can see if
it works, you can try out each definition as you go.
In article <3380@haddock.ISC.COM> karl@haddock.ISC.COM (Karl Heuer)
mentioned Logo and Comal as other good learning languages - I'd never
heard of the latter (what's it like?) but Logo cetainly is well
designed for the job... Sad that it's so slow...
Forth, of course, gives you more ability to do things not anticipated
by the language designers - but I'm not convinced that this is a
necessarily a good thing for learning. For example, some built in error
checking can reduce frustration in programming.karl@haddock.ISC.COM (Karl Heuer) (04/11/88)
In article <BORIS.GNUS2@charon.mit.edu> boris@charon.mit.edu (Boris N Goldowsky) writes: >In article <3380@haddock.ISC.COM> karl@haddock.ISC.COM (Karl Heuer) >mentioned Logo and Comal as other good learning languages No, I didn't. That was <3325@tekgvs.TEK.COM> by tekgvs!keithe (Keith Ericson)
kasper@csli.STANFORD.EDU (Kasper Osterbye) (04/13/88)
In article <BORIS.GNUS2@charon.mit.edu> boris@charon.mit.edu (Boris N Goldowsky) writes: >In article <3380@haddock.ISC.COM> karl@haddock.ISC.COM (Karl Heuer) >mentioned Logo and Comal as other good learning languages - I'd never >heard of the latter (what's it like?) Without going into a comal discussion in this Forth newsgroup, I will try give an answer: Comal is developed in Denmark by a highscool teacher who did not want his students to learn/put up with BASIC. It is interactive to the same degree as BASIC, global variables can be set and read interactivly. Its structure is close to pascal, only with no datatypes. It datatypes is closer to BASIC (rather good strings, arrays and %interger and real). As someone said, there are turtle graphics, and I believe that one can write a procedure, and call it directly from the prompt (like lisp, logo and Forth). It does recursion with local variables. It was the first thing I ever learned, and I can warmly recommend it for a first encounter to programming. --Kasper.