rrw@naucse.UUCP (Robert Wier) (02/01/89)
Sometime in the next few semesters, I may be teaching a university senior level undergraduate course in Real Time Systems. Although it was pointed out in a recent technical note that the Mac isn't truly a real time system, it is the premier *event-driven* system. The need for such a course was brought home to me recently during the presentation of an engineering senior design project, which involved designing a Mac front - end interface to an existing Circuit Analysis Program, originally designed to basically run in "batch mode". The student stated that the project had been a great challenge since he had not encountered writing event-driven programs in any of his coursework. The background of the students who will be taking my course will be that they will already know Pascal and (probably) C (or Fortran). The difficulty is that I am not sure that someone can be taught to program the Mac human interface in one semester (along with the other course content, such as running stepper motors, reading temperatures, etc). Back in the old days, three years ago when I learned to program the Mac, it was via the "gritted teeth" method ... reading the IM manuals, and looking at whatever existing code I could get my hands on at the time. It took me longer than I care to admit. In order for such a project to be DOABLE in 16 weeks, I feel that some help must be provided to the students in the form of organized, higher level code assistance. Thus I am soliciting comments on Mac programming aids. Just scanning through MacUser, I see such familiar titles as MacExpress, Visual Interactive Programming, and ZBasic. In looking at MacTutor, I find MacYacc, Prototyper 2.0, and the Programmer's Extender series. Ideally, a system would allow me to spend two or three weeks talking about the Mac Interface Guidelines, and then the students could throw in their application code plus other code to manipulate windows, watch the event queue, etc, without getting too tangled up in low level detail. If you have used any packages which might be useful in this situation, I'd greatly like to hear your opinions. Feel free to E-Mail me direct if you'd prefer not to post here, and I will summarize. many thanks - -Bob Wier at Flagstaff, Arizona Northern Arizona University ...arizona!naucse!rrw | BITNET: WIER@NAUVAX | *usual disclaimers*
mcdonald@fornax.UUCP (Ken Mcdonald) (02/02/89)
Thought I'd post, as this kind of thing might be interesting to
various people,
The original question concerned a Mac programming environment that
made use of Mac-ish features (events and so forth) but didn't have
the ridiculour learning curve associated with the computer we all
know and love so well.
I am not extremely well qualified to judge either of these products,
but it strikes me that Transkel for Pascal and LightSpeed Pascal could
be a real killer combination for this kind of thing. Transkel is nice
in that it is a source code library which is not intended to be modified
(or at least not much)--you just use it like it was a set of language
extensions to Pascal. And it's free! LSP also looks like a great
product, providing an environment that blows away anything I've encountered
on a mainframe or micro (not that my experience has been extensive), and
does so at an incredibly reasonable price. But even without LSP TranSkel
looks great--event-oriented prgramming, "the way it was meant to be."
Hope this helps,
Ken McDonald
{...ubc-cs!mcdonald@fornax}
P.S. The reason I am not terribly well equipped to judge either TranSkel
or LSP is that I have had each for less than a week. Look for a more
complete review :-) of these comments after I have had time to go through
them in depth. My intitial impression, though is to pass on congrats to
Rich Siegel, Owen Hartnett, and Paul DuBois for the parts they have
played in developing these products.