[David Jack]

16/03/2022 at 10:28 am

I used Comal for standard grade and higher, although VB was the “new” language that the school were keen to introduce. I left school in 2001.

[David Muir]

16/03/2022 at 4:03 pm

COMAL, Pascal, BBC BASIC;
TrueBASIC, Visual Basic, Small Talk;
Scratch, Kodu, HTML;
LiveCode, Java, JavaScript;
Python, Ruby, PHP;
C, Perl or SQL;
and not forgetting Logo!

And not forgetting Logo! My first crit lesson as a student Computing teacher was a Logo lesson. The school I was in had four different types of computer in the room and therefore four different favours of Logo. For the record, there were RM 380Z machines (AKA 38 ounce machines for obvious reasons), BBC micros, Dragon 32 machines and Sinclair Spectrums. There were two pupils to a machine and only the RMs had disk drives. Computing teachers today have it easy! Cue mutterings of: “We had to teach Computing in a cardboard box in t’ middle of the playground…”

[David Muir]

16/03/2022 at 4:06 pm

I used Comal for standard grade and higher, although VB was the “new” language that the school were keen to introduce. I left school in 2001.

Again, easy life. You only had to learn COMAL; I had to teach it. Although, I am surprised it was still being taught in 2001. I assumed it had disappeared well before then.

[brendanm]

16/03/2022 at 10:11 pm

When AI was part of the Higher course we taught Prolog. I remember Tom Conlon at Moray House introducing microProlog on the Spectrum.

[Kenneth…]

17/03/2022 at 10:20 am

I didn’t want to mention Prolog in case it confused the Young’uns. I remember the appendices at the back of the SG Arrangements that exemplified the programming specification in Comal, Prolog and Spreadsheets.

[Michael Mullin]

04/05/2022 at 11:59 am

I’m late to the chat! We talk frequently at network meetings about how teaching and assessment could be made clearer buy having a SQA nominated language. Shoe-horning a programming language around the SQA curriculum can be tricky and students may write thoughtful solutions that do not access the marking scheme. SQARL is clumsy and open to interpretation depending on what language you’ve been learning…a single nominated language would remove this issue and allow the powers to produce a curriculum without ambiguity (lists v arrays, records v tuples v dictionaries all potentially being used for the same/different things), it could be built around the nominated language and provide clarity in the curriculum. A nominated language would not have to be compulsory, you would just have the option. Python, being open source wouldn’t have a financial burden (pupils also able to use it at home) and as a community we could pull resources quickly to have courses in place without too much effort. When we moved to python, we just started with S2 and rolled it out as that group moved through school.

Concatenation. I explain concatenation to my classes like this. Commas are used to separate parameters. Print is a function that accepts multiple parameters. print(a,”b”,c) is just 3 parameters; 3 pieces of separate/individual data. The input() function only accepts 1 parameter, hence the need to concatenate fully using the + symbol: input(“What age are you” +name+”?”). This message, I hope, shows why a comma separated list of values doesn’t satisfy the definition of ‘joining’.