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From: stecker@unc.cs.unc.edu (Melanie Stecker)
Newsgroups: comp.edu,comp.sys.mac,comp.lang.pascal
Subject: Re: Good teaching pascal for Macs?
Summary: LightSpeed Pascal
Message-ID: <7098@thorin.cs.unc.edu>
Date: 4 Mar 89 04:52:07 GMT
References: <1183@naucse.UUCP>
Sender: news@thorin.cs.unc.edu
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I have found LightSpeed Pascal to be easy for students
to use.  The "pretty printing", in which it handles all
indentation and places all keywords in boldface, relieves
the student from dealing with formatting their programs.
This allows them to see which lines LSP interprets as being
in any given compound statement, and lines up matching begins
and ends - handy for beginning programmers.  

The debugging facilities are great.  Its interpretive quality
disallows simple syntax errors.  Compile time errors are pointed
out with an appropriate thumbs down and error message.  There is
an observe window and trace/step facility that works well, esp.,
I found, when debugging routines using pointer variables.

The manual, naturally, leaves some to be desired.  The newly
released version makes reference to "Inside MacIntosh", so beware.

A problem we encountered, though, was that the new, and only 
supported version, version 2.0, requires, I believe, 2 floppy
drives and 1 meg memory.  It sounds like you are equipped to 
handle 2.0, but check into it.

Good Luck!
-MS