Re: free software

Roseann Krane (rkrane@dimacs.rutgers.edu)
Thu, 26 Sep 1996 00:19:05 -0400


Wow that is so typical.. but I thought it only happened in the California
school system. Being an experienced individual in this foul up situation, I
can tell you what my kids did in 1991 when we had Internet but no software.

Use UNIX! Have them login and cat or maybe use emacs and write the programs
for Pascal or C or C++ or even Fortran and run them on the free UNIX
compilers. I can send you details if you are interested. There are no bells
but all the software works.

Also there is a lot of shareware at www.shareware.com which I have used. I
used Liberty BASIC and it wasn't bad at all. I liked it better than the
Microsoft Visual BASIC. I believe there is a TLC Pascal for the Mac that is
shareware which you can use instead of Think Pascal which you must buy. The
real problem with the MACs is that they don't make things upward compatible
so what might work on a Centris possibly won't work on a Power MAC. There is
also a shareware version of C++.

There are lots to choose from and it might be a great exercise for the
students to search out the different compilers and test them. Do tell me the
results.

Good luck.

Roseann Krane

At 11:09 PM 9/24/96 -0400, lee cristofano wrote:
>howdy all-
>
>does anyone know where my school could obtain the BASIC and PASCAl
>programming languages for free? i heard a rumor that there are freeware
>or shareware versions of this on the 'net.
>
>it seems our school district bought $58,000 worth of powermacs, but
>somehow "*forgot*" that they would need some software for our computer
>science classes. and naturally, we have no money budgeted for software,
>so we'll just have to wait until next year.
>
>we either use pencil and paper or our old IBM PS/2 286 machines. (pencil
>and paper compiles faster, by the way :-)
>
>and you thought JAVA was the only language that runs on a virtual
>machine.
>
>any ideas?
>
>see ya soon
>lee
>
>