Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bbn!rochester!ken
From: ken@cs.rochester.edu (Ken Yap)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal
Subject: Re: Seeking Humanities Programming Texts (Pascal Preferred)
Message-ID: <2817@sol.ARPA>
Date: Thu, 1-Oct-87 13:15:47 EDT
Article-I.D.: sol.2817
Posted: Thu Oct  1 13:15:47 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 5-Oct-87 04:38:25 EDT
References: <21261XBQ@PSUVM>
Reply-To: ken@cs.rochester.edu (Ken Yap)
Organization: U of Rochester, CS Dept, Rochester, NY
Lines: 45

This appeared in comp.lang.pascal so you Iconers should have a go
at disabusing this person's misconceptions.

In article <21261XBQ@PSUVM> XBQ@PSUVM.BITNET (Ed Winograd) writes:
|I'm looking for a good beginning programming text for my students
|in Liberal Arts 482 at Penn State.  The course focuses on TEXT PROCESSING
|rather than on number crunching and is designed for humanities majors
|who have no previous programming experience.
|     
|I'm currently teaching my class PL/C, a somewhat stripped-down version
|of PL/1.  However, since this language is generally available only on
|IBM mainframe systems, it's not the optimal language to use.  Although
|I know that Digital Research puts out a PL/1 for IBM PC's, it's very
|expensive, and I have never seen ANY references to it (if anyone has
|used it, what's it like?  Is it compatible with mainframe PL/1?).
|     
|I realize that SNOBOL and ICON are widely used for text processing,
|but SNOBOL is so radically different from any other language that
|I hesitate to use it (but am willing to be convinced otherwise, if
|there's a good TEXT to go with it -- the Green Book is MUCH too
|hard for beginners).  And I'm a little hesitant to use ICON, since
|so many of the implementations seem to be public domain ones of
|unknown quality and robustness.
|     
|The best language to teach seems to be Pascal, since it's a structured
|language which is widely available, and not as dangerous as C for
|beginning programmers.  But the lack of string primitives in ISO
|Standard Pascal is a major problem.
|     
|So, my main question is if anyone knows of a Pascal text for
|humanities programming that uses a version such as UCSD Pascal or Turbo
|Pascal.  If so, I'd very much like to hear from you.  Otherwise,
|I'm open to considering other languages if there's a GOOD text for them
|that my beginners/humanities students could use.  The machines available
|to me are an IBM mainframe using VM/CMS, IBM PC's, and Macintoshes.
|     

Icon of dubious quality and not robust? Nonsense. Most of the
implementations are of U of Arizona descent, and are written in C.
Works real well.  There are IBM PC and Mac versions. I don't know about
those implementations but I'm very happy with the Unix implementation.
I can prototype an application faster than in Pascal or C. And I don't
mean text processing only, I test out search algorithms with Icon.

	Ken