[fpc-other] Re:Pascal Showcase Project/Education

[Mark J. Wood]

And of course, one of the reasons that Turbo Pascal was so popular for 
educators was the straight forward progression from source to exe 
(although I seem to recall a linking stage in the early days, I think, 
but even that's not so bad). It would be good if there was a version of 
an ObjectPascal that was packaged to meet that need, as you say. I often 
teach in TP, but it's such a dinosaur. It would be good to have a 
bridging step.

Mark.


Richard Ward wrote:
>
>>> For beginning computer science classes I think a
>>> simpler IDE would be more suitable and for advanced courses, the
>>> complete environment could be used.
>>
>> Full ACK. While I am teaching Object Pascal, I start with gedit + fpc in
>> shell. The Lazarus IDE is too much for beginners. But the use of gedit
>> and fpc has some restriktions. No integrated debugging enviroment for
>> example.
>> I wish there where something like the textmode ide of fpc in gtk and/or
>> win32.
>
> ------
>
> I agree the full Lazarus IDE would be too much for beginners. Mattias 
> mentioned i n a later post about plans for a simpler educational 
> Lazarus.  That's why I also mentioned Ingemar's LW IDE.  Looking over 
> the comments in the Educational Lazarus page, I see that one of the 
> main concerns is that beginning students mostly use only one source 
> file.   LW IDE is a nice IDE for this type of project as you don't 
> have to worry about makefiles, a project file or pathnames at all if 
> you are running generic Pascal programs.   And even when you start 
> adding units, the mechanics of organizing your files is very simple 
> and still no makefiles or project files.   As an added bonus, a source 
> level debugger is in an initial testing release phase.   Here is some 
> information on it for those interested - it's about a page long.   It 
> is a Mac specific IDE but the design I think is good for the 
> educational market and more.
>
> http://www.ragnemalm.se/lightweight/
>
>
> ***********
>
>> beginners.   It is also supports other languages like Java and C which
>> might be attractive for CS curriculums.  Although it runs on Macs,
>
> I wouldn't do that if simplicity is an objective. It pulls in two 
> additional
> different styles of building programs, which makes it hard to exploit the
> advantages of Pascal's autobuilding.
>
> ----
>
> Actually, the main emphasis is on Pascal and the other language 
> support is thrown in to help with other things since including them 
> supposedly was not that hard.  It really does exploit Pascals "unit" 
> interface/implementation framework very well and utilizes it so 
> external makefiles and includes and stuff are not needed.   If you 
> have your units all in the same directory, all you have to do is have 
> your main program source file up (no others) , hit build and the IDE 
> automatically directs FPC to compile the units up the chain.  Once you 
> get more libraries this gets unwieldily, but THEN, you can specify 
> additional paths in a preferences dialog which is a guide for the 
> compiler.   But that is still simpler than a makefile process.   But 
> the main point here is for educational use where one can literally 
> create a new text file, type i n a simple
>
> Program  xyz;
> begin
> writeln('Hello World');
> end.
>
> hit run and it compiles, links, executes, and runs like all your old 
> favorite IDE's.
>
> My purpose is not to promote this particular IDE (although I am 
> personally very pleased with it) but just to provide an example of 
> something which can be created in FPC (which it is) as an idea for a 
> possible showcase app which might generate some interest.   The FPC 
> source for this IDE is available as well.
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