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From: Salmon Egg on 27 Jan 2010 05:32
About 20 years ago, I liked to program in Pascal because it imposed a
degree of discipline that I would otherwise not had. Since retirement,
my needs for programming have been satisfied by using Excel. Lately
however, I find the need for something a bit more heavy duty to
manipulate strings. My thoughts ran to Pascal, but BASIC would be OK as
well.

My problem is that I want a vanilla version without all the versatility
and features that seem to pervade software. Borland Pascal was good. You
could type and run. UCSD Pascal on the Apple ][ was good. You typed your
file and then could run.

Now it seems much more complicated. I wanted to use Lightweight IDE, but
found out that you also needed FPC and Xcode. all with poor
instructions. That is why I am considering BASIC again even with its
built-in lures to produce spaghetti code.

What would people here recommend that allow simple data manipulations
but not require much integration of software from multiple sources?

Bill

--
An old man would be better off never having been born.
From: nospam on 27 Jan 2010 05:59
In article <SalmonEgg-5F14B1.02321527012010(a)news60.forteinc.com>,
Salmon Egg <SalmonEgg(a)sbcglobal.net> wrote:

> What would people here recommend that allow simple data manipulations
> but not require much integration of software from multiple sources?

how about applescript?
From: Christoph Gartmann on 27 Jan 2010 06:21
In article <SalmonEgg-5F14B1.02321527012010(a)news60.forteinc.com>, Salmon Egg <SalmonEgg(a)sbcglobal.net> writes:

>What would people here recommend that allow simple data manipulations
>but not require much integration of software from multiple sources?

I just ran into a very similar problem - I wanted to teach my kids a bit of
programming, of course without a lot of stuff around. I thought about Pascal as
well. So I came across FreePascal (www.freepascal.org). Here the main problem
was the installation. On the Mac it requires SDK. This is a bit tricky to find
because Apple lists only the new version for Snow Leopard (my system has still
the standard Leopard). So you have to download SDK for the iPhone. Here they
offer still both versions. Once installed it is working. For the beginning I
use a terminal window:
fpc test
./test

Regards,
Christoph Gartmann

--
Max-Planck-Institut fuer Phone : +49-761-5108-464 Fax: -80464
Immunbiologie
Postfach 1169 Internet: gartmann(a)immunbio dot mpg dot de
D-79011 Freiburg, Germany
http://www.immunbio.mpg.de/home/menue.html
From: Tom Stiller on 27 Jan 2010 07:13
In article <SalmonEgg-5F14B1.02321527012010(a)news60.forteinc.com>,
Salmon Egg <SalmonEgg(a)sbcglobal.net> wrote:

> About 20 years ago, I liked to program in Pascal because it imposed a
> degree of discipline that I would otherwise not had. Since retirement,
> my needs for programming have been satisfied by using Excel. Lately
> however, I find the need for something a bit more heavy duty to
> manipulate strings. My thoughts ran to Pascal, but BASIC would be OK as
> well.
>
> My problem is that I want a vanilla version without all the versatility
> and features that seem to pervade software. Borland Pascal was good. You
> could type and run. UCSD Pascal on the Apple ][ was good. You typed your
> file and then could run.
>
> Now it seems much more complicated. I wanted to use Lightweight IDE, but
> found out that you also needed FPC and Xcode. all with poor
> instructions. That is why I am considering BASIC again even with its
> built-in lures to produce spaghetti code.
>
> What would people here recommend that allow simple data manipulations
> but not require much integration of software from multiple sources?
>
> Bill

Perl is ideal for manipulating simple data. it's already installed on
your Mac.

--
Tom Stiller

PGP fingerprint = 5108 DDB2 9761 EDE5 E7E3 7BDA 71ED 6496 99C0 C7CF
From: Warren Oates on 27 Jan 2010 08:30
In article <tom_stiller-9C75BC.07135627012010(a)news.individual.net>,
Tom Stiller <tom_stiller(a)yahoo.com> wrote:

> Perl is ideal for manipulating simple data. it's already installed on
> your Mac.

I was going to suggest PHP. Or even Javascript. Both of them can be used
as straight procedural languages, or with a lot of OOP gobbledygook for
people who like bicycles. PHP has just about everything built in. There
are cli versions available for JS and PHP, and you _can_ use them for
"shell" scripting.

I mean, the hardest thing you have to teach to begin with is:

variables
flow-control
umm, now this "parameter" thing, how does that get ...

and so on. What is a pointer. What is an object (a bicycle).

Obviously, these are interpreted languages, you're not going to jump
straight into linkers and makefiles and awk and sed and thank gawd too.
--
Very old woody beets will never cook tender.
-- Fannie Farmer
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