Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 UW 5/3/83; site uw-beaver Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxj!houxm!vax135!cornell!uw-beaver!info-mac 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.