[Grace-core] Grace text

[Kim Bruce]

As some of you know, I have started work on rewriting my Java-based introductory text to be based on Grace.  I have finished a (still somewhat rough) first draft of Chapter 1, so thought I would share it just to see if anyone had any reaction to the approach.  In particular, I've found it interesting to explain the language to novices.

I should point out that the purpose of the first chapter is just to give a quick overview of programming and a few simple examples of how Grace is used.  It is intentionally not designed to carefully explain anything.  As with my previous text, the idea is to give people a sense of how things work before overwhelming them with syntactic rules.  Thus you will notice that while I have introduced methods and defs, I have not introduced variables at this point.

Of course, there are a number of things that I'm not yet happy with.  One of the main ones is the necessity of constructing locations with aLocation.at(...).  Who knows, maybe I'll even decide to like 3 at 7 as representing the location (3,7) (though I still cringe a bit with it)?

Compare with original Java version at http://eventfuljava.cs.williams.edu/chapters.html

Comments are very welcome.

Kim


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