Deutsche Welle news article on Raspberry Pi - "Raspberry Pi and the new computer science kids"

IIRC it is mainly dates that don't fit into my "mostly" category above ;-)

It would be so much easier if everyone used ISO-8601. Dates in general cause so much problem with different formats, time zones, DST changes etc. And I really hate the US format of mm/dd/yyyy.

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(\__/)  M. 
(='.'=) If a man stands in a forest and no woman is around 
(")_(") is he still wrong?

I'm sure the yanks must do now since their "9 11" event... Too soon?

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Regards, J B Good

How about just NAND or NOR gates? Why use two devices?

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Gambling with Other People's Money is the meth of the fiscal industry.  
 me -- in the spirit of Karl and Groucho Marx

Start them with AppleScript. Can do a lot of very interesting stuff (It can interact with application programs) and they will learn why English language syntax is not good for a language.

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Gambling with Other People's Money is the meth of the fiscal industry.  
 me -- in the spirit of Karl and Groucho Marx

"To be an Error and be Cast Out is part of God's Design." William Blake

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Gambling with Other People's Money is the meth of the fiscal industry.  
 me -- in the spirit of Karl and Groucho Marx

"When Microsoft enters the vacuum cleaner business they will finally have a product that doesn't suck."

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Gambling with Other People's Money is the meth of the fiscal industry.  
 me -- in the spirit of Karl and Groucho Marx

COBOL teaches that quite adequately and runs on many more systems.

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martin@   | Martin Gregorie 
gregorie. | Essex, UK 
org       |

The latter perhaps, but I don't think COBOL would be good for giving commands to GUI programs, although with a suitable set of callable routines it could be done. Maybe t'were best done in Objective COBOL or "ADD 1 TO COBOL" (or should that be "INCREMENT COBOL BY 1".

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Gambling with Other People's Money is the meth of the fiscal industry.  
 me -- in the spirit of Karl and Groucho Marx

Yep. Using it to demonstrate the problems involved in using an English language based programming language as opposed to a mathematically based and block-structured was all I meant. Nothing more.

COBOL is OK for writing non-interruptable imperative procedures but not much else. OTOH, if you write the main structure, interrupt handling and thread management parts of a real-time system in C and delegate the procedural aspects, i.e. the operations carried out within threads, to COBOL, that can work quite well.

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martin@   | Martin Gregorie 
gregorie. | Essex, UK 
org       |

I am always amazed at people who complain about a programming language not being able to do things that it was never designed nor intended to do.

"Propose to an Englishman any principle, or any instrument, however admirable, and you will observe that the whole effort of the English mind is directed to find a difficulty, a defect, or an impossibility in it. If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible: if you peel a potato with it before his eyes, he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple." Charles Babbage bill

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Bill Gunshannon          |  de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n.  Three wolves 
billg999@cs.scranton.edu |  and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. 
University of Scranton   | 
Scranton, Pennsylvania   |         #include

That wasn't my point: I should have omitted what I said about threading, because it obscures my main point.

What I was getting at is that, although COBOL can be more concise at times (how many lines would your favourite language take to take a value in binary pence and format it exactly as required by the PIC "$$,$$$,$$9.99 DB" BLANK WHEN ZERO declaration?), in general its close-to-English syntax and requirement to include all exception handling as part of the sentence whose verb causes it, e.g.

READ KEY-FILE INVALID KEY PERFORM KEY-NOT-FOUND GO TO ERROR-RECOVERY.

often makes the code less clear than it might be, and certainly very verbose, especially if you insist on using OF clauses to reference the components of records. Then there are other features that fall out of its use of pseudo-natural language, such as the lack of any connection between the literals used to set the values that an 88 level tests from the other literals used to define the 88 level, that don't help at all.

I think that COBOL is based on a fundamental misconception: that there exist programmers who can understand all the ramifications of a MOVE or MOVE CORRESPONDING statement but who cannot understand assignment statements as used in Algol 60 or Fortran (to pick on its contemporaries).

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martin@   | Martin Gregorie 
gregorie. | Essex, UK 
org       |

On Tue, 30 Apr 2013 10:43:43 -0400, Walter Bushell declaimed the following in comp.sys.raspberry-pi:

The Fujitsu COBOL 4 that was supplied with "COBOL: From Micro to Mainframe 3rd Ed" included a GUI capability of some sort. Unfortunately, the installer was W9x compatible -- I've never gotten it to install on a WinXP machine (and I'm quite sure it will never install on a 64-bit Win7 machine).

And Fujitsu seemed to have dropped "student" versions leaving the

16-bit COBOL 3 as the last available free download. (I actually emailed the author of that book as the v4 supplied also included the report writer module, lacking in v3 and previous edition of the book).

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	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN 
        wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/

Some COBOL dialects did have a built-in set of extensions to ACCEPT and DISPLAY that could handle an 80 x 24 green screen type of display, though the only time I used it was on a Tandem NonStop system which used Tandem's rather bastardised SCOBOL for screen handling.

It would be interesting to see if your Fujitsu COBOL runs in the DosBox

16-bit DOS/Windows emulator or under WINE in W95 mode. However, I don't know if DosBox runs on ARM-based systems and almost certainly WINE would not.

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martin@   | Martin Gregorie 
gregorie. | Essex, UK 
org       |

???

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Ineptocracy 

(in-ep-toc?-ra-cy) ? a system of government where the least capable to lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers.

Need to use yyyyymmdd.

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Gambling with Other People's Money is the meth of the fiscal industry.  
 me -- in the spirit of Karl and Groucho Marx

On Wed, 1 May 2013 00:16:15 +0000 (UTC), Martin Gregorie declaimed the following in comp.sys.raspberry-pi:

This version has an addition to the Data Division -- a "Screen Section" -- in which one defines text screens which act as data entry forms (fixed background text and input fields). A Fujitsu specific extension (my college Advanced COBOL class didn't go quite that easy, but we did have a library of functions to control Hazeltine terminals... But then, that was late 70s, not a late 90s compiler).

I'm pretty sure this one wouldn't... As mentioned, Fujitsu COBOL 3 was available free from their site (this was around 2000-2001) and was (I believe) 16-bit. The book came with COBOL 4.0 in a learning edition (data files limited

That is largely true of the versions of BBC BASIC available for the RPi, i.e. ARM BBC BASIC under RISC OS and Brandy under Linux. Personally I think it's a pity those versions haven't been updated to a similar spec to 'BBC BASIC for Windows', but then I would say that!

Indeed so. BB4W has structures of course. And an OOP library. ;-)

That's not a universally-held view. The OCR (Oxford, Cambridge and RSA) examining board specifically recommends BBC BASIC, for example as being suitable for their J275 GCSE Computing qualification:

80112.doc

They say "Any programming environment can be used but Unit A451 may contain questions in a generic pseudocode that looks a lot like BBC BASIC, eg BBC BASIC for WINDOWS, or PASCAL.... all tasks have been tested in VB.net and BBC BASIC for Windows to make sure they are suitable".

Indeed many schools have adopted BBC BASIC in the last year or so, and there will be a whole new generation of youngsters who have learnt the language.

Richard.

On the other hand as a *teaching* language it has two rather wonderful features. The in-line assembler that lets you dip your toe in the water closer to the machine without having to go cold turkey, and the EVAL function that lets you create macros and working code on the fly.

Combining those two I was able to make a 16k utility EPROM on a model B compiling from text files. In the process I learned a lot about multi-pass conditional assembly, macros, file systems and position independent code.

I think these days only LUA these has an equivalent of eval.

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W J G

unless I very-much misunderstand what you're saying

javascript, php, bash, lisp, python are also capable of eval-like operations, some even of executing dynamic code

forth, postscript, tcl and perl may be capabile of eval too, I've not checked.

eval is a feature present in most interptrted languages.

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?? 100% natural