Chapter 3.0: School -- Classes
Chapter 3.2: School -- BASIC vs. Pascal vs. ASM
The door at the back of the auditorium opened and I looked around. Two people
entered, and one of them raised a hand in a wave. As they moved past the
brightness of the light flowing in through the door, I saw that it was Atsuko
with a guy that might be her boyfriend. He looked like a typical West Texan,
lank, cowboy hat, cotton tee with some band graphics, jeans, boots. I raised a
hand in response.
As they approached the front row, I stood to meet them.
"Nobody here, yet?" Atsuko asked.
"Middle of the morning, and it's just the first recital of the semester, just us beginners. We're doing good to get family and a few friends." I nodded at the row behind, where a few of the family and friends of the other students sat.
"So, uhm, Joe, this is Tim."
"Nicetah meecha, Tim," I nodded and extended a hand.
"Yeah." He slapped my palm and gave my hand a shake, testing my grip strength.
I grinned and returned the grip, just enough to let him know we didn't need to
put each other in pain, and he grinned back.
The door at the side opened, and my mother came in. Julia followed her. I waved them over.
"Your mom?" Atsuko asked.
"Yeah."
"Is that your girlfriend?" Tim's voice had an edge.
「きれいだわ。」 (Kirei da wa. -- She's pretty.) Atsuko's
words were sub-voiced, and I barely heard them. I looked over at Tim, and I
couldn't tell whether he had noticed that she had spoken, much less understood
the Japanese.
"A friend of the family," I explained as they joined us. "Atsuko, Tim, this is
my mom, and our friend Julia. Atsuko is a friend from the English lab, and
Tim," I looked from Tim to Atsuko without pausing, "is her boyfriend." Neither
of them contradicted me.
We made small talk for a few minutes, then the bell rang and we sat down.
I was the last to sing. One of the piano students had volunteered to be my
accompanist for the recitation, and we had spent some time together
transposing the tune to fit my range and working out an arrangement within her
abilities, so neither of us were pushing our envelopes too far. She played the
intro, and I began:
枯れ葉散る夕暮れは来る日の寒さを物語り…
(Kare ha chiru yū-kure wa kuru hi no samusa wo monogatari ... --
A leaf-blown evening tells of chilly days to come ...)
When we finished, I took my bow and signaled to the accompanist so she could take hers, and there was the obligatory applause from the small audience, and that was that. We sat down and our teachers debriefed and dismissed us.
After thanking my accompanist, I rejoined my personal audience.
"Thanks for coming Mom." I exchanged smiles with Mom and grinned at Julia. "You, too, Julia. It was a nice surprise."
She grinned back. "Your dad said it wouldn't hurt me to skip the first part of his class today. Nice singing. I wish I could understand it."
Atsuko laughed. "Yes, nice singing. But it's a woman's song. Next time you perform it, rearrange the lyrics, too."
"You're the only one besides me who knows." I raised my eyebrows at her and grinned. Then I shrugged. "And I'm not sure my Japanese would be up to the necessary changes."
Atsuko and I both laughed.
Julia touched my arm. "Teach me what the lyrics mean sometime. I'd better get back to class." And she and my mom left.
Tim looked at me doubtfully. "Not your girlfriend?"
"Who knows? Not yet anyways."
"Is Japanese hard?"
I gave him a sharp look. "Much harder if you don't learn it. You don't want to give up something good just because it's hard. Cross-cultural relationships need every advantage you can give them. Let Atsuko coach you."
He gave me a surprised look.
"Seriously, it'll be way more fun than watching MASH reruns together."
Both Tim and Atsuko laughed.
Atsuko took Tim's hand and looked him in the eyes. "We can't give up. I'll give up some of my English study to help you."
Tim ducked his head. "Okay. I ... we'll keep trying." He turned towards me. "Thanks for letting us come listen, Joe."
"Thanks for coming."
(I can only wish the real me could have been this with-it at twenty-one.)
*****
Professor Crane walked in the door and the pre-class chatter dropped slightly in volume.
"Good morning guys. I've got a question for all y'all."
He had all our attention for a moment.
"Using BASIC's command line, how'd ya convert an American shoe size of eight and a half to a metric shoe size?"
"Oh, is that all?" Lisa turned back to continue talking to Dirk, and about half of the class followed suit.
Professor Crane gave her a wry grin. "This is a serious question."
Lisa shook her head. "Dead simple." She stood up, went to the whiteboard, and picked up a marker.
PRINT 8.5 * 2.54
"Done!" She put the marker down and turned to sit down.
"But who's gonna go to the trouble of typing that on a punched card?" Don asked.
Lisa rolled her eyes.
"Or," Dirk raised his eyebrows meaningfully at Lisa, "who's going to bother plugging in her Apple just to type that in?"
Lisa had an Apple II at home, and was doing her programming homework on it.
"How about listing the conversions from size five to thirteen?" I asked. "I
could maybe see plugging in a microcomputer for that."
Lisa grumbled and turned back to the whiteboard.
10 FOR I = 8 TO 13
20 PRINT I*2.54
30 NEXT I
Professor Crane chuckled. "Sometimes I think Joe sneaks peeks at my lesson plans. So, let's say we want to provide the sales guys with something they can plug a range into. And they want half sizes, going both directions. And they don't want to learn BASIC."
Mike leaned back. "I think our professor just gave us our next assignment."
Professor Crane shook his head. "Not yet. This is just background. And we need to watch this in action. Since Joe and Lisa didn't bring their computers to class today, let's all go to Professor Bright's office."
"There's action in the prof's office?"
"If we're going to play computer, we can do that here."
There was plenty of jesting and complaint, but the fourteen of us followed Professor Crane out the door and down the hall to Professor Bright's office.
Theo was first through the door. "There's a computer on your desk, Professor Bright," he announced.
Professor Bright was seated at his desk, waiting for us. He opened his mouth
to answer.
"Computer terminal, I think," George commented as he filed in.
Professor Bright closed his mouth with a patient smile.
Pat nodded in agreement as she followed George. "Dumb terminal for the
Univac."
Lisa and I were last, hanging behind in the doorway behind Dirk and Andrea, giving the other students room.
"RS-232 cables," I observed. "One goes to the printer --"
"That's a printer?" Daren asked. "It looks like a typewriter without a keyboard."
"Yeah, it's a printer," Professor Crane said. "Although typewriter without keyboard is also a good description. And?"
Daren remained bemused.
"And," I continued, "the other cable goes to the wall, and the Univac is on the other side of the wall, so I think it's a good guess it's hooked to the Univac. But I think it's an intelligent terminal, judging from what's on the screen."
The screen showed tags for the keyboard function keys along the bottom, with
several data frames of the sort we now call windows, according to the Apple
Macintosh's terminology.
Professor Bright nodded. "That's right, the brains are in the computer room on the other side of that wall. This is just a terminal -- although actually a terminal with intelligent functionality, as Joe has surmised." He pressed a key, and the screen blanked, to change to a login screen.
Professor Crane explained from behind most of us, "We have been able to obtain several of these terminals on the cheap from the same company that gave us the good price on the used Univac. There won't be enough terminals for everyone to have their own, so we'll have to schedule use, but I think we'll find them more convenient than punched cards for certain uses. And, of course, those who prefer punched cards ..."
"I don't think I prefer punched cards."
"I'll be happy to give up my time on the card punch!"
"I think I can live without punched.cards."
"Hey, consider the poor card punch's feelings!"
"And the cards'!"
"Consider my feelings!"
"Card punches don't have feelings."
"How do you know? Have you ever asked one?"
Both professors were chuckling at this point.
"You haven't even tried these terminals yet," Professor Crane cautioned. "For all you know, they may be too arcane for you."
"No way!"
"We can handle some arcane!"
"Arcade? These things play Invaders?" Lisa laughed at her own joke.
Both professors groaned as most of the students again erupted in jokes and
conjecture.
"Actually, I'll bet they could be programmed to play a game like Pac Man."
All the students turned towards me.
"Not that I would try it," I continued, glancing back at Professor Crane, "without permission."
"Enough of that. Time's a-wasting." Professor Bright called our attention back to the terminal screen. "Pat, since you work as a night operator at your dad's company, how about if you take the driver's seat?"
Professor Bright stood up and other students complained teasingly as they made
way for Pat to move to the desk and sit down.
Professor Bright told Pat what to
, and she logged in and loaded the BASIC interpreter and started it in interactive mode, then we watched as she followed his instructions and demonstrated using the interpreter as a calculator. Then he explained how to load and run the BASIC program he and Professor Crane had written to calculate the shoe size chart, and she demonstrated that.
"We also put the same program together in Pascal."
"Professor Bright did the Pascal, not me."
Professor Bright told Pat how to load, compile, and run the Pascal program he had written, and she demonstrated it for us.
"Okay, now you've had an advance look at how to use the terminals," Professor Crane said. "Let's go back to the classroom and reinvent the code."
Return to classroom, build simple BASIC program as class. Make flowchart. Show basic flow elements.
Teacher walks through writing pseudo-code, then compares Pascal to
pseudo-code.
Add BASIC subroutine call to show halves. Make new flowchart with call.
Add Pascal routine to show halves.
In here, Dan, Mike, Pat, George, and some others get some time and visibility. Pat's knowledge about Unix is briefly refered to, only mention that it's an OS, and that it has bc.
Lisa's TRS-80 and trashing TRS-80. My protoboard, but need to leave Mike able to assume it's 68K. Somebody's Apple II.
Discussion of using index registers to set up a stack frame. I use either 6809 or 68K for the example, because 6800 requires so many op-codes and uses temporaries as stack pointers, but I don't explain that to the class. Should my conversion to 6800 be here or in its own chapter?
(This chapter is pretty much of whole cloth. Only the barest seeds of it have anything to do with the author's reality, but it is also necessary for the calculations. Otherwise, even the me of this fantasy world could not have done what he will do.)ー-------------
Need, actually, a chapter for the basic program, for modularity, for Pat'sC version, and for the Pascal version. Maybe more.
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This is repeating, but need some of the different expressions here:
After some simple introduction coding in the first two weeks, Prof. Crane explained how to use GOTOs to synthesize structured flow elements, and explained loosely how a stack in memory could be used to synthesize local variables. This was part of the answer to the argument about BASIC's deficiencies. With a bit of discipline, one can write structured code in BASIC, but BASIC itself doesn't help very much.
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Need a whole chapter for the structured programming in BASIC
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(Kanji study has again become a significant, but optional part of the missionary study of Japanese.
There was a parallel to the church's attitude in the Japanese education programs, and in the Japanese media use of Kanji. During the 1970s, they reduced the number of Kanji required through high school, and the Kanji officially used in newspapers to under 2000.
Personal computers became powerful enough to handle Kanji well, and the number of Kanji regularly used in newspapers returned to over 3000 by the 1990s. Elementary school education still focuses on a list of 600 through the sixth grade, and there is still a list of about 2000 that should be known by high school graduates, but they don't place artificial restrictions on the use of Kanji from outside those lists.)
[Backed up at
https://joel-rees-economics.blogspot.com/2020/01/bk01-33209-school.html.
Earlier backup at
https://joel-rees-economics.blogspot.com/2020/01/bk-33209-school.html.]
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