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From: ejbehr@rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu (Eric Behr)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.apps
Subject: Another Pascal question
Message-ID: <1991Apr20.003848.12364@rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu>
Date: 20 Apr 91 00:38:48 GMT
Reply-To: ejbehr@rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu (Eric Behr)
Organization: Central Illinois Surfing Club
Lines: 25

I recall seeing some discussion about Pascal implementations on the Mac
lately. Since I've had regular news access for only about a month, I missed
most of it. Sorry if I'm beating a dead horse.

There's no doubt that for Mac development, Think and MPW are *it*. But what
do you do when you *teach* plain-vanilla Pascal on the Mac? We've used
Borland for a long time, because it had most of the advantages: small,
fast, conforming to standard for the most part, cheap, etc.

Now that it is no longer actively supported (was it ever?) and causes
problems under MF, we are looking for a replacement. Think is very nice,
but it will always be comparatively expensive - it is after all aiming to
be a full-fledged professional development environment. Moreover, all the
Mac-specific features are bound to confuse some students no end. What to
do?

If Think is listening, how about releasing a "crippled", cheap educational
version of their compiler/editor, without extensive project management
features and with a rudimentary debugger? (We found that students, when
given the chance, didn't use the debugger very much anyway!!!) I may be
wrong, but judging by our experience, someone could make a *lot* of money
on something like that...         Comments?    Thanks - E.
-- 
Eric Behr, Illinois State University, Mathematics Department
Internet: ejbehr@rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu    Bitnet: ebehr@ilstu