Re: [Sheflug] getting pascal running linux?

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <nospam [at] sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>]

>>>>> "Will" == Will Newton <will [at] misconception.org.uk> writes:

    Will> due to Pascal being rather outdated (it's still seen as a
    Will> good language to teach programming, but no-one uses it,
    Will> figure that one out...)

I think it's only considered "good for teaching" because it's so
restrictive.  The strange syntax (semicolon is a separator, not a
terminator; pass by value and and pass by reference are distinguished
by the "var" keyword, etc) actually makes it hard to teach (at least
to Japanese students ;-) in my experience.

If I were choosing a language to teach novices in, I'd use either a
Lisp (Scheme for simplicity or Emacs Lisp because of the immediate
applicability) or Python (Perl's syntax is more mainline, but it's
just too grody.

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