Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!dali.cs.montana.edu!milton!uw-beaver!ubc-cs!manis From: manis@cs.ubc.ca (Vincent Manis) Newsgroups: comp.edu Subject: Re: Logo for college-level computer literacy courses Message-ID: <8970@ubc-cs.UUCP> Date: 1 Aug 90 20:00:00 GMT References: <1990Jul31.195854.4630@cs.rochester.edu> <31840@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> Sender: news@cs.ubc.ca Organization: Institute for Pure and Applied Eschatology Lines: 31 In article <31840@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> scarfone@acsu.buffalo.edu (Steve Scarfone) writes: >I've just started using Logo in my computer literacy course. Its a >mixed bag. I'm strongly inclined to agree. Logo has many virtues, but its syntax has a number of peculiarities. On top of that, its use of dynamic (fluid) variables is now considered somewhat old hat (lexical scoping is easier to understand and much less error-prone than dynamic scoping). >If I could get the advantages of turtle graphics, the syntactic >simplicity of lisp, and the programming support of Turbo, running on a >PClone, I'd be very happy. Try PC Scheme, which was developed by Texas Instruments, but now appears to be sold by MIT Press/Scientific Press. The student version of PC Scheme, costing around US$37.50, includes a full Scheme interpreter/compiler, object-oriented programming package, DOS interface, Emacs-style editor, and other goodies. There is also a professional version, at around US$100.00, which adds extended/expanded memory support (don't know how that runs with Windows), as well as a full external language interface. We at the University of BC recently created a computer literacy course. The initial thought was to use Scheme; in the event, the people teaching it decided to use Pascal, but mostly because the book they were thinking of adopting (``Computing Unbound'') uses Pascal. -- \ Vincent Manis "There is no law that vulgarity and \ Department of Computer Science literary excellence cannot coexist." /\ University of British Columbia -- A. Trevor Hodge / \ Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1W5 (604) 228-2394