xbq@psuvm.bitnet.UUCP (10/01/87)
I'm looking for a good beginning programming text for my students
in Liberal Arts 482 at Penn State. The course focuses on TEXT PROCESSING
rather than on number crunching and is designed for humanities majors
who have no previous programming experience.
I'm currently teaching my class PL/C, a somewhat stripped-down version
of PL/1. However, since this language is generally available only on
IBM mainframe systems, it's not the optimal language to use. Although
I know that Digital Research puts out a PL/1 for IBM PC's, it's very
expensive, and I have never seen ANY references to it (if anyone has
used it, what's it like? Is it compatible with mainframe PL/1?).
I realize that SNOBOL and ICON are widely used for text processing,
but SNOBOL is so radically different from any other language that
I hesitate to use it (but am willing to be convinced otherwise, if
there's a good TEXT to go with it -- the Green Book is MUCH too
hard for beginners). And I'm a little hesitant to use ICON, since
so many of the implementations seem to be public domain ones of
unknown quality and robustness.
The best language to teach seems to be Pascal, since it's a structured
language which is widely available, and not as dangerous as C for
beginning programmers. But the lack of string primitives in ISO
Standard Pascal is a major problem.
So, my main question is if anyone knows of a Pascal text for
humanities programming that uses a version such as UCSD Pascal or Turbo
Pascal. If so, I'd very much like to hear from you. Otherwise,
I'm open to considering other languages if there's a GOOD text for them
that my beginners/humanities students could use. The machines available
to me are an IBM mainframe using VM/CMS, IBM PC's, and Macintoshes.