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Date:Mon Jan 15 15:23:36 1996 
Subject:Two New Poplog-Centred Teaching Resources. 
From:Robin Popplestone 
Volume-ID:960115.02 

Last year I implemented a Scheme compiler in Poplog, together with a set of
25 online lectures for a course on "Programming Paradigms". The course  and
the Scheme have been debugged on a class of 40 students.

Currently I am working on a  C compiler which is oriented towards  teaching
by exploiting the dynamic checking one gets for free from Poplog. This,  if
I manage to get it up-to-scratch by the end of the month, will be used by a
colleague for  a  course on  Data  Structures.  As a  Department,  we  have
considerable reservations about teaching C early in the curriculum, and the
Poplog based system is an attempt to make the language more user-friendly
by providing feedback about run-time errors in a helpful form as soon as
they are detectable, as well as more informative compile-time messages.
Interactive evaluation of expressions is also provided - the final form of
this within a .c file will probably be as a #pragma pre-processor line.


Both systems employ  a new  generic debugger that  I have  written for  the
purpose. This allows  a granularity  of evaluation down  to the  expression
level to be presented, along with the display of the source-line in VED.

I would be happy to share this material with any interested party.

Robin.