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From: info-mac@uw-beaver (info-mac)
Newsgroups: fa.info-mac
Subject: Re:  MacTerminal & MacPascal, Like WOW...
Message-ID: <1840@uw-beaver>
Date: Tue, 9-Oct-84 01:46:42 EDT
Article-I.D.: uw-beave.1840
Posted: Tue Oct  9 01:46:42 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 4-Oct-84 04:02:55 EDT
Sender: daemon@uw-beave
Organization: U of Washington Computer Science
Lines: 39

From: winkler@harvard.ARPA (Dan Winkler)
Yes, we've had the release version of MacTerminal for a while.  It has
the annoying feature that it frequently goes to the disk for no
apparent reason.  Martin Haeberli told us that it is snapshotting
memory as a precaution against power failure.  Another annoying feature
is that if you use it on a disk that doesn't have an ImageWriter file,
it will give you an alert box *every time* you run it informing you
that you will not be able to print and will wait for you to click OK.
It does, however, work very well with macput and macget.

We've also had Macintosh Pascal for a while and are teaching one of our
introductory programming courses on it.  We only have 40 copies for 260
students, so we are treating it like a reserve book that can be signed
out of the library for 3 hours at a time.  It has been working out well
(much better than it did last year when we had over 300 people on 1
Vax) and the situation should be even better next year since there is
considerable interest among students to buy their own copies (and their
own macs) when they become available.

Macintosh Pascal is fantastic for teaching.  The observe window with
single step mode makes it easy to to explain everything from variables
to loops.  And QuickDraw keeps our examples interesting.  (We've even
been getting some applause after lectures, a rare event in computer
courses here.)

One complaint is that text I/O is quite slow.  We had one program that
took about 5 times as long to run when we put in writeln's to narrate
its progress.  And we've found two minor bugs relating to what types
work in a case statement and as array indices.  

But our overall impression is very favorable.  It's much, much better
for teaching than Berkeley pascal.  I just hope that they'll do a C
development system in the same style.