putnam@ccvaxa.UUCP (12/02/87)
Does anybody out there know which brand of Basic for the Mac is the best? No language wars please! This is for a young friend of mine who will soon encounter Basic in school. ZBasic looks interesting. Is it friendly enough for a novice?
JEFF@pucc.Princeton.EDU (Jeffrey Perry) (10/06/89)
What follows is a strange tale, and not for the faint of heart...
I am responsible for helping a team of Mathematics professors
with their courseware. They are currently using TrueBasic to teach
beginning Calculus. (The student doesn't actually write any programs
in TrueBasic, he/she simply enters different values for various
equations, and TrueBasic draws different curves, spirals, etc. which
result from applying those values to the equations.)
The major problem is that TrueBasic doesn't let the student make
a screen dump of the output window (i.e. of the curve or spiral itself,
as distinct from the program's text, which of course may be printed
quite simply with the "Print" command provided) to a LaserWriter
(Imagewriters are not available in the public Mac clusters here at
Princeton, so an Imagewriter screen dump, which might be possible,
does us no good). Sure, we can create a MacPaint document using
command-shift-3, but MacPaint is not available to the students
(it used to be when it was bundled with the Mac, but that was a
while ago...).
We even have an F-key gizmo called Flower-Shift-5 that would create
perfectly good screen dumps to the Laserwriter, were it not for the
antiviral software installed on all the system diskettes issued to
to the students for the Mac Pluses in our public clusters, and on
all the hard disks on the SEs in the clusters. For various reasons
reasons disabling or modifying the settings on Gatekeeper, the
main anti-viral program, so as to allow the user to install
Flower-Shift-5, has been ruled unwise by the folks who look the
public clusters here.
The long and the short of this all is that we need to know if anyone
out there is familiar enough with other Basic interpreters/compilers for
the Mac to say for certain that one of them (Microsoft QuickBasic?
ZedCorp Basic?) can, as a standard feature, send screen dumps of output
to a Laserwriter connected via Appletalk to the Mac on which it runs,
WITHOUT THE INTERVENTION OF ANY OTHER HARDWARE - F-KEYS, INITS, DESK
ACCESSORIES, ETC. This latter is crucial. The students need to submit
a printed picture of their output screens to get credit for the
assignments; that's the crux of the entire problem.
Thanks for listening to this rather involved tale. If don't have
any first-hand experience with Mac Basic programming, please pass
this on to a friend who does.
Jeff Perry
CIT/Princeton University
JEFF@PUCC.PRINCETON.EDUts@cup.portal.com (Tim W Smith) (10/09/89)
Why not have the students just turn in the MacPaint file and let the TA or grader print it? Tim Smith