Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ncar!noao!arizona!naucse!rrw
From: rrw@naucse.UUCP (Robert Wier)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Mac Programming for Students
Message-ID: <1149@naucse.UUCP>
Date: 1 Feb 89 04:24:44 GMT
Organization: Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ
Lines: 50


 Sometime in the next few semesters, I may be teaching a
university senior level undergraduate course in Real Time
Systems.  Although it was pointed out in a recent technical note
that the Mac isn't truly a real time system, it is the premier
*event-driven* system.  The need for such a course was brought
home to me recently during the presentation of an engineering
senior design project,  which involved designing a Mac front - end
interface to an existing Circuit Analysis Program, originally
designed to basically run in "batch mode".

The student stated that the project had been a great challenge
since he had not encountered writing event-driven programs in any
of his coursework.

The background of the students who will be taking my course will
be that  they will already know Pascal and (probably) C (or
Fortran).  The difficulty is that I am not sure that someone can be
taught to program the Mac human interface in one semester (along
with the other course content, such as  running stepper motors,
reading temperatures, etc).  

Back in the old days, three years ago when I learned to program the
Mac, it was via the "gritted teeth" method ... reading the IM
manuals, and looking at whatever existing code I could get my
hands on at the time. It took me longer than I care to admit.

In order for such a project to be DOABLE in 16 weeks, I feel that
some help must be provided to the students in the form of
organized, higher level code assistance.  Thus I am soliciting
comments on Mac programming aids.  Just scanning through
MacUser, I see such familiar titles as MacExpress, Visual
Interactive Programming, and ZBasic.  In looking at MacTutor, I
find MacYacc, Prototyper 2.0, and the Programmer's Extender
series.  Ideally, a system would allow me to spend two or three
weeks talking about the Mac Interface Guidelines, and then the
students could throw in their application code plus other code
to manipulate windows, watch the event queue, etc, without 
getting too tangled up in low level detail. 

If you have used any packages which might be useful in this
situation, I'd  greatly like to hear your opinions.  Feel free to
E-Mail me direct if you'd prefer not to post here, and I will
summarize.

 
 many thanks -

 -Bob Wier at Flagstaff, Arizona         Northern Arizona University
  ...arizona!naucse!rrw |  BITNET: WIER@NAUVAX | *usual disclaimers*