Path: news.daimi.aau.dk!jlk From: jlk@daimi.aau.dk (J|rgen Lindskov Knudsen) Newsgroups: comp.lang.beta Subject: Re: Teaching BETA Date: 5 Jan 1995 14:58:36 GMT Organization: DAIMI, Computer Science Dept. at Aarhus University Lines: 33 Message-ID: <3eh1es$8d4@belfort.daimi.aau.dk> References: <3ecb84$l4g@harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au> <3eghuh$cd1@fbi-news.informatik.uni-dortmund.de> <3egua3$8u0@clarknet.clark.net> Reply-To: jlknudsen@daimi.aau.dk (Jorgen Lindskov Knudsen) NNTP-Posting-Host: lithium.daimi.aau.dk The BETA language and the Mjolner BETA System have been used for the second-year course in programming here at Comp. Sci. dept., Aarhus University, Demmark for several years. I have been the teacher the last three years. The course is a half-year course and is taken by 120-80 students each year. We are currently using release 3.0 of the Mjolner BETA System on HP and SUN workstations, and the students have access to the Linux version for their home machines. Free distribution rights of this Linux version for course participants is part of the educational license programs for the Mjolner BETA System. The experience in teaching the language is very positive. The students quickly grasp the object-oriented way of creating software, and they are happily unaware of problems like memory leak, manual garbage collection, constructors, whether destructors should be virtual or not (and why), where to put the * and & when working with pointers(references), etc. They also very quickly grasp the elegancy of models which can be created using the orthogonal aspects of the language. The teaching material is primarily the BETA book: Ole Lehrmann Madsen, Birger Møller-Pedersen, Kresten Nygaard: Object-Oriented Programming in the BETA programming Language, Addison-Wesley, 1993, ISBN 0-201-62430-3 Please feel free to ask for more details, -- Jorgen Lindskov Knudsen, Computer Science Department, Aarhus University Ny Munkegade 116, DK-8000 Aarhus C, DENMARK E-mail: jlknudsen@daimi.aau.dk, Phone: +45 89 42 32 33, Fax: +45 89 42 32 55