[Lazarus] Teaching Pascal at College

Tue Oct 18 12:42:47 CEST 2016

On Tue, Oct 18, 2016 at 12:48 AM, Travis Ayres <trayres at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm all for this effort, and hope it leads to new and modern tutorials,
> books or notes that would be useful for others that use FreePascal/Lazarus
> to convey graphical system interactions. If there's any need to proofread
> such materials, I'll gladly help out!
>
>
To test a large program , I want to use Petri Nets to drive the testing
steps in an information processing , let's say network , to simulate a
business environment :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petri_net
(  Petri net  )

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Petri_nets
Category:Petri nets

( My work on this is "Perhaps" now ... )

One unfortunate situation is that there is not much Pascal software for
Petri Nets processing , except the following ( which its license is very
ambiguous means not usable ) and may be considered very old with respect to
new Pascal language level :

http://staff.um.edu.mt/jskl1/petrisim/
PetriSim - Discrete Simulation Environment

There are others , perhaps , but again , not usable very well .

Petri Nets are a vast subject now . There are some Petri Nets processing
software but their licenses being copy left are not friendly for commercial
environment .

For event driven systems , Petri Nets are very important .

My opinion is that a "good" , "permissively" licensed , as much as general
purpose Petri Nets simulation software may be a very useful tool for the
students to simulate their event driven system definition , and , then
write its special purpose Pascal program by using Lazarus easily .

Actually , it is not compulsory to use Pascal , but Pascal will supply the
Pascal programming language learners a very good example , its license will
permit them to use some of its parts whatever they want to do without any
hostile restriction in any environment .

In such a tool , only it is necessary to describe the nodes , information
flow between nodes , etc. .
( Please see above link about PetriSim . )

Mehmet Erol Sanliturk

> On Oct 17, 2016 6:32 PM, "Mehmet Erol Sanliturk via Lazarus" <
> lazarus at lists.lazarus-ide.org> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Mon, Oct 17, 2016 at 12:05 PM, Lars via Lazarus <
> lazarus at lists.lazarus-ide.org> wrote:
>
>> > On 14/10/16 08:30, Michael Schnell via Lazarus wrote:
>> >
>> >
>> > Of course there are decent drawbacks regarding relying too much on RAD
>> > and about not really understanding the fundamentals behind it. But in
>> the
>> > end the addressees are non-computer engineers.
>>
>> The big issue with teaching using a RAD tool, is welding the program logic
>> into the onclick events, instead of decoupling the logic in separate
>> procedures that can be reused elsewhere.  RAD tools are superior at
>> prototyping... I can't believe how awesome they are at that. They are
>> inferior, however, when it comes to bad habits being brought on.  With
>> this warning, RAD tools can still be very useful for writing solid
>> programs, as long as one knows this warning ahead of time.
>>
>> When I first learned delphi I made the mistake of putting code in the
>> onClick events and similar, and then when you expand your app later you
>> realize all that code is welded in place and cannot be reused outside of
>> the events.
>>
>> Of course decoupling the logic from the GUI leads to more layers of code.
>>
>>
> -------------
>
>
>
>
>> How I got rid of my bad habits when I first learned delphi: I started
>> writing console apps with no object oriented programming, no events, and
>> learned that not everything is a click event in computer programming.
>>
>>
>
> -------------
>
>
> My opinion is that the above ideas are really very good to be applied
> during teaching :
> First , teach language on , let's say , "atomic" problems . Then , use
> these "atomic" concepts in further problems either embedded in a GUI or
> console program .
>
> One obvious point is that an "event" driven programming knowledge is a
> must to become a competent programmer . The problem is how this can be
> learned . Without knowing how to program an algorithm when a related event
> is occurred , will bring any one to nothing means ( not to a success ) .
>
> -------------
>
>
>
>> People late in the game (learned programming when GUI's were available)
>> and have no experience with console mode apps will earn some bad habits
>> because of the GUI oriented programming. Those with experience in other
>> areas of programming such as old Dos programs, web programs (basically
>> like a dos or unix console program) will learn different ways of
>> organizing code without everything being tied to a GUI event driven code.
>>
>> I suppose even doing a plain Win32 API app with no delphi code (pure win
>> api) would help someone learn how to organize code from a second opinion
>> view, without being forced to use the event driven system you were given
>> by the RAD tool.
>>
>>
>
> -------------
>
>
>
>> Of course, also learning other programming languages helps (although, IMO
>> learning too many brain dead languages and hip cool ones will not help, as
>> much as others claim... Basic programmers from the 80's or 70's still
>> think in GOTO's and line numbers)
>> --
>>
>
>
> -------------
>
>
>
> With respect to researches ( I am not able to supply links now because
> this view is based on old times readings , but I am sure that such research
> findings can be found ) ,
>
> people ( mostly ) uses a "primary" language for her/his profession and a
> "secondary" language for some her/his works as an additional tool .
>
> This shows that during teaching , this feature should be taken into
> consideration : Guide the students to discover which language she/he will
> prefer to use in much of her/his works , and attempt to teach that language
> in a "best" way to be used by the students in their profession .
>
> A similar approach should also be used for a "secondary" language .
>
> If a language is taught just for fun or whatever else other than being a
> possible candidate for "primary" or "secondary" is likely that , if it not
> a necessity for the learner , is only a waste of everything is involved .
>
>
>
> Mehmet Erol Sanliturk
>
>
>
> --
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