OH! PASCAL!
by Doug Cooper & Michael Clancy.
Copyright 1982 by W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
ISBN 0 393 95205 3
OH! PASCAL! is without doubt one of the most friendly textbooks I have ever encountered. Thanks to the designing and typesetting of Doug Cooper, it is a “structured” volume. It has 470+ pages and 15 “structured” chapters. Each chapter proceeds in an orderly manner, and contains “error trapping” in the form of “self-check questions” which are answered on the spot. Additional self-test problems are posed at the end of most chapters; answers to these exercises are contained in a special section “in the back of the book”. Most chapters also contain a specific section entitled “Antibugging and Debugging”, plus a brief chapter review.
Humorous aspects of programming are not neglected. A series of time-lapse photos of a demolition project illustrate the concept that “(Sometimes) it’s better to start over from the beginning”. The Leaning Tower of Pisa illustrates the truism that, “Testing may show the presence of bugs, but is doesn’t say much about their absence”.
I seem to have damaged my only Pascal tape in mid-stream, so to speak, so I was unable to test the full range of programs and procedures contained in OH! PASCAL!. I did manage to run a few, and with excellent results, after making minor changes to accomodate the limitations of the T/S 1000 and Partial Pascal.
OH! PASCAL! is highly recommended to those interested in advancing their programming “savvy”.
TSH