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> Sender: news@pdn.paradyne.com Reply-To: reggie@dinsdale.paradyne.com (George W. Leach) Organization: AT&T Suncoast Division, Largo FL Lines: 67 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. George W. Leach AT&T Paradyne (uunet|att)!pdn!reggie Mail stop LG-133 Phone: 1-813-530-2376 P.O. Box 2826 FAX: 1-813-530-8224 Largo, FL USA 34649-2826