nelan@enuxha.eas.asu.edu (George Nelan) (06/28/90)
Howdy,
Some time ago I posted:
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Believe it or not, I'm looking for some leads to anything that might be
able to solve some of the following problems in our CS dept...
We are currently teaching our frosh "C" on System V (tm) intel-micros.
It seems that the kiddies are having the expected problems one might expect
in this situation. Now, the following observation just doesn't cut it:
hey, why not let 'em hack it out? - if they want in the kitchen that bad
let 'em learn to live with the heat.
Well, not so simple. The drop-out rate's just too high as it is.
So, we are looking for some sort of "user-friendly" UN*X-C tools.
I think we're going to get SDB, so that should help somewhat. I guess what
we're really looking for is something in the editor/compiler/documentation
user-friendly dept. Perhaps something like the "context-sensitive editor"
that Borland's Turbo-C (tm) provides (but for System V (tm)). I don't think
we mind if a commercial product can help (as long as a reasonable edu.
discount is available). We're also looking into GNU-stuff.
Anyway, if anyone can help us with this situation, we'd sure as heck
appreciate it. Please email if you can.
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Then a little later:
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I've been getting quite a response to my recent posting aswking about friendly
UN*X UI's for undergrads (frosh in partic.). So, please give me a while
(a couple of weeks anyway) then I'll post an appropriate followup.
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I now have a followup to offer. I apologize for the delay.
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From berman@sparky.rutgers.edu Thu Jun 7 11:06:50 1990
if you're running Xenix on your micros I believe you can get
Microsoft C 6.0 which has a decent environment. (I'm not
positive the Xenix version is out yet, I've seen the DOS/OS-2
version).
If you set up GNUEMACS for them you can create a reasonable
environment, except for the debugging. But at least it will
help them indent, and find syntax errors.
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From davecb@nexus.yorku.ca Thu Jun 7 11:38:27 1990
Methinks Alice might help: it was an older product for teaching
Pascal in a Unix environment (BSD as it happens) that several
subsequent vendors copied. Including a crypto-Danish one (:-)).
Write to brad@looking.uucp (route via watmath.uwaterloo.ca if needed),
his company got its start writing things like that for UW.
Failing that, try RedC, a nice student compiler from D. Hugh Redelmeier, at
hugh@redvax.uucp (route via utzoo).
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From spencer@spline.eecs.umich.edu Fri Jun 8 09:36:13 1990
I got a blurb last fall for something called "Saber C". Looked
interesting. I think it requires a window system to run, though. I
don't have their address any longer, I'm afraid. I think they're in
Boston.
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From mbk2@uafb15.uark.edu Tue Jun 12 10:19:47 1990
I was reading a recent issue of _Infoworld_ ( June 11, 1990 ) and
saw an advertisement on PAGE 94 which reminded me of your request.
I'll spare you of a reprint here, but the product was Professional
Edit and the company was Buzzwords International Inc. (314) 334-6317
and I'll assume _Infoworld_s are everywhere you are. I know no
more about the product than I can get from their advertisement, but
I know that if it were available to me, I'd play with it. In any
case I assume that you haven't found a suitable product since you've
posted no follow-up to comp.edu.
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Note: I later learned we're not too interested in commercial products,
thanks anyway.
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From one of our own:
Just talked to Marc about emacs. It seems that _possibly_ some of
what we are looking for still exists in the version of emacs we have.
This is really just GNU emacs with 16-bit characters and support for
kanji and other foreign alphabets. Marc has found some files (in the lisp
subdirectory) that indicate alternative _modes_ are available (in
particular LaTex-mode, c-mode, emacs-lisp-mode, fortran-mode, modula2-mode,
nroff-mode, prolog-mode).
Note: we haven't decided upon the suitability of this stuff yet...
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Hope this helps!
--
George Nelan, ERC 252, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, USA, 85287
INET: nelan@enuxha.eas.asu.edu
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