> As I read your message I began remembering that a personal E-mail
> from one of the Oberon microsystems folks in December 1994 said that
> a book analagous to Reiser & Wirth was in the works for Oberon/F, and
> that they hoped it would be published by the end of 1995. Needless
> to say, there is no sign of anything like this for students or teachers
> like yourself. Perhaps you should write one and, after testing on a few
> classes, offer it for publication.
That is my plan. I have some experience, having published a book
commercially on Pascal 6 years ago for the same market. In the course
I am teaching now we have so far covered interactive i/o with dialog
boxes using the forms subsystem; abstract data structures, abstract
data types, and classes a la Mossenback; using stacks, queues, and
binary trees with some simple modules that I have written and provided
the interfaces for; the IF statement; WHILE and FOR statements; the
MVC paradigm; input from the focus window with a text view; creation
of a text model and its display in a new window; proper and function
procedures with value and variable parameters; inheritance of
procedures by extending the stack, queue, and binary trees. We
are starting arrays tomorrow. I hope to get to recursion before the
course is over.
The biggest problem for beginners is the scanner in the TextMappers
module. It is fine for experienced programmers, but has too many
compilcated details for first year students. I will have to design
a simpler scanner for next time. The formatter is fine as is.
I plan to work on a draft that will be available for beta proofing
in August, at which time I'll start contacting publishers. It will
be a textbook for classroom use, but should be fine for independent
study as well. I hope to cover more in the book than in the class.
> Personally, for many reasons I would bet that within a few years
> Java will be the "first language" at colleges, sweeping the old C and
> older Pascal traditions away.
Yes, this is the big debate at the Computer education conferences
I attend. C++ in the introductory course was the big debate the
past few years, but now it is shifting to Java. The sad thing is
that when you discuss the issue, very few people know about
Oberon/F. Most people associate Oberon with the other Oberon
systems and dismiss it out of hand. There are a few schools
that use it, but advertising and textbooks are virtually nonexistant.
If my teaching project continues to be as successful as it has been
so far, I am hoping to eventually conduct some workshops to spread
the word.
Stan Warford
Pepperdine University
warford@pepperdine.edu