Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!pdn!dinsdale!reggie
From: reggie@dinsdale.nm.paradyne.com (George W. Leach)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal
Subject: Re: Pascal text (query)
Message-ID: <6499@pdn.paradyne.com>
Date: 14 Aug 89 12:00:49 GMT
References: <650@njitgw.njit.edu> <3725@buengc.BU.EDU>
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Reply-To: reggie@dinsdale.paradyne.com (George W. Leach)
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In article <3725@buengc.BU.EDU> bph@buengc.bu.edu (Blair P. Houghton) writes:
>In article <650@njitgw.njit.edu> parker@mars.njit.edu (bruce parker cis fac) writes:
>>Students at NJIT use an IBM-PC clone and will shortly be using Turbo Pascal 5.0.
>>In general, they do NOT have the Borland manuals (at least as far as I can
>>tell).

   Right, in fact most of the instructors don't have them either :-)

   I attended NJIT in the mid to later 70's and taught there for several
years in the evenings in the mid 80's.  I was there when they switched 
over to the PCs and Turbo.  Prior to that they had been running on a
Univac from terminals.  When *I* attended, we ran cards on the Interdata 32 :-)

>>My problem is this:  while getting the Borland documentation to the students
>>is important, the books are lousy for teaching.

>>Any suggestions?

>Borland's manuals are _documentation_, not texts.  GET THEM!

   Yes, they are docs.  They should be sufficient along with any general
text on Pascal as Blair points out.

>Turbo Pascal, while a semi-user-friendly programming environment, is
>nonetheless a typically misfeature-bloated Pascal implementation.

   Yup.  However, to be fair I *do* think that the system does enough
to cover up all the gorry details of how does one run a program on the
particular system that one is on to allow the students to concentrate
on what they are supposed to learn ---> Pascal.

   At first, I didn't think much of using PCs and Turbo.  However, after
witnessing it in action one semester I changed my mind.  There were three
PC labs filled with almost 50 PCs each.  Also, students had PCs at home.
Availability was quite high.  This had never been the case before when
using a terminal.  In my day, we never used the terminals because there
were so few of them available.  One could only sign up for a one hour
block of time.  So cards were the most available means of accessign the
machines.

   Once the student mastered the hideous editor, everything else was rather
simple.  I do feel that somewhere down the road there needs to be a switch
over to a more powerful implementation of Pascal.  The students will quickly
outgrow the need for the training wheels that Turbo provides them :-)

>Without the actual manual, students will beat themselves silly trying
>to track down bugs and to write routines for which library
>procedures exist.

   Instructors too!  I had to *BEG* to get a manual when I was there.

>Further, these kids aren't going to be using Turbo all their lives.

   Bingo.  See above.

>Get a book on generic Pascal, and plenty of copies of the Turbo docs.

   Right.  Grogono (Spelling?) has always been my favorite.  When I was
last at NJIT the text was Dale and Orshalick.  In my mind this was a
far too simplistic book for a technical university.



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