PP4S Home Page
Welcome to the PP4S Website!
The aim of the website is to provide valuable, but free, resources to help promote Pascal programming in schools by sharing ideas, knowledge and experience. We welcome contributions and feedback on the site. Please let us know what you think.
There is plenty more still to come but there is enough on the site for a beginner to learn how to program.
"Your site is great. It builds up talented young people's understanding of Computing and Pascal capability, understanding and skills in quite a simple way through use of various examples. It's very good for students that want to develop their computing talents independently. Pascal does seem to be preferred by quite a lot of schools nationally at the moment."
We have added this quote and others to support our reasons for encouraging you to learn Pascal at school.
- follow the instructions on Getting Started with Lazarus (updated to refer to a recent version of the IDE) or our section on Getting Started with Delphi;
- start to work through the first few tutorials in order;
- look at the student programs, starting with the more straightforward ones at the beginning of the table and also the first few using the Crt unit.
New! We have added an index of the routines used in tutorials and in student programs. One or more selected examples illustrate the use of each routine.
New! We have extended our section on challenges to provide more ideas for programs and examples of new mini-challenges.
New! Joe, our youngest contributor to date, acknowledges help from his father in his program SnakeWithoutATail. Beginners will be able to use the admirable code in this short, unfinished version to find out how to move a character around the screen. The program also demonstrates simple collision detection.
The following paragraphs describe our previous update to the website.
We have added a tutorial on translators. We are privileged to republish and adapt Jack Crenshaw's highly instructive tutorial entitled Let's Build a Compiler!. Like us, Jack believes in the value of "learning by doing" and you can work through some or all of the sixteen parts to do just that. (We have changed the output to Intel-style assembler and tested the generated code within Pascal in-line assembler blocks). Similarly, our sections on interpreters and assemblers include opportunities for you to experiment with code.
Christopher's latest contribution fits in pleasingly with the above. His robust calculator tokenises, parses and evaluates expressions comprising integers and/or fixed-point real numbers with the operators +, -, *, / and ^ and brackets. The program outputs helpful error messages if the syntax of the input is incorrect. Christopher uses a TList to implement the stack in his object-oriented implementation of the shunting-yard algorithm.
We have added the first version of a general index, accessible from the new link in the left panel of this page. Please let us know of any further items that you would like us to include in the index. We are working on an index of Pascal routines.
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