ejbehr@rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu (Eric Behr) (04/20/91)
I recall seeing some discussion about Pascal implementations on the Mac lately. Since I've had regular news access for only about a month, I missed most of it. Sorry if I'm beating a dead horse. There's no doubt that for Mac development, Think and MPW are *it*. But what do you do when you *teach* plain-vanilla Pascal on the Mac? We've used Borland for a long time, because it had most of the advantages: small, fast, conforming to standard for the most part, cheap, etc. Now that it is no longer actively supported (was it ever?) and causes problems under MF, we are looking for a replacement. Think is very nice, but it will always be comparatively expensive - it is after all aiming to be a full-fledged professional development environment. Moreover, all the Mac-specific features are bound to confuse some students no end. What to do? If Think is listening, how about releasing a "crippled", cheap educational version of their compiler/editor, without extensive project management features and with a rudimentary debugger? (We found that students, when given the chance, didn't use the debugger very much anyway!!!) I may be wrong, but judging by our experience, someone could make a *lot* of money on something like that... Comments? Thanks - E. -- Eric Behr, Illinois State University, Mathematics Department Internet: ejbehr@rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu Bitnet: ebehr@ilstu
tnorthtj@cc.curtin.edu.au (Tim North) (04/22/91)
In article <1991Apr20.003848.12364@rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu>, ejbehr@rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu (Eric Behr) writes: > [stuff deleted] > If Think is listening, how about releasing a "crippled", cheap educational > version of their compiler/editor, without extensive project management > features and with a rudimentary debugger? (We found that students, when > given the chance, didn't use the debugger very much anyway!!!) I may be > wrong, but judging by our experience, someone could make a *lot* of money > on something like that... Comments? Thanks - E. > -- If you can live with a Pascal *interpreter*, try MacPascal v3.0 by Symantec. It's cheap, simple, and perfect for a first course in programming. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------- | Dept Computer Engineering, Curtin University of Technology / o ---- | Perth. Western Australia. Phone: +61 9 351 7908 / / / / / | Internet: North_TJ@cc.curtin.edu.au | Bitnet: North_TJ%cc.curtin.edu.au@cunyvm.bitnet _--_|\ | UUCP: uunet!munnari.oz!cc.curtin.edu.au!North_TJ / \ |------------------------------------------------------------- -->\_.--._/ |I don't want to achieve immortality through my work... v |I want to achieve it through not dying! -- Woody Allen. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------