Posted by Christian Klauser on 2007-05-29 01:36 CET

Hi, As a student at the Gymnasium Bern-Neufeld I had the pleasure to work with Champ during my introduction to programming. I already knew the syntax and the basic semantics of C++ at that time and was (and still am) really impressed by Champ because it enables students to focus on the actual problem they got to solve instead of the tool. The thing that bugs me, is it's restriction to Borland C++ 4.5x. Ok, it still works but I find it horrible to work with that IDE. It doesn't even have support for mouse wheels... Now, why am I complaining about Borland C++ 4.52 to you, you might wonder. Because by refusing to rewrite Champ you force hundreds of poor students to work under such unproductive conditions. And I haven't even mentioned the limitations of 16-bit computation... You wrote: "Yes, I'd still sell Champ licenses, there just aren't that many buyers..." I can tell you why: People don't want to call vendors, beg for item TCB0000WWFS181 and pay over 80 swiss francs for an ancient, unsupported compiler/IDE just to compile 16-bit code. Especially if better compilers and IDEs are available free of charge. If you want to sell Champ (which is, I would like to emphasize that, really great) you will have to port it to a modern platform. You could choose *nix but keep in mind that many schools including ours have computers running Windows (mostly NT flavors). And now comes the part you will like the least: One of the best C++ IDEs currently available is Microsofts Visual Studio. And no, I'm not talking about the "Visual" part of VS or VC++ (I don't get the joke myself, to be honest), it's about a modern editor with code completion and a very powerful and easy to use debugger. Now... VS is pretty expensive but I'm sure you have heard of the free express editions. If you didn't like the previous paragraph, you will hate this one: What about switching to a more modern programming language altogether? I would suggest something easy like Java or C#. Both provide performance comparable to C++ while being a lot easier to use (array of variable size, not having to forward-declare functions, faster compilers, more useful debuggers due to reflection...) I would even propose to target Visual Basic 8, as it does background compilation and tells novice programmers immediately that they've made a mistake, but since you seem to dislike the word "Visual" and I personally prefer C-family languages, I won't. But you got to admit that semicolons and case-sensitivity are not really helpful when tasked with learning to program. The ultimate solution, from my point of view, would be to release Champ as a .NET assembly (written in C# or C++/CLI) since it would be your customers choice, which programming language to use/teach. If you don't like the idea of distributing your precious library in bytecode, there are obfuscators for .NET and Java. But when reading through the sparse forum posts and your hostile attitude towards everything remotely connected to microsoft, I guess that the students of the Gymnasium Bern-Neufeld will continue to be tortured with Borland C++ 4.52 until the school decides to switch to Windows Vista in 5 to 10 years which fortunately does no longer come with a 16-bit subsystem but instead includes the .NET Framework 2.0... Before I press the [Post Message] button I have to emphasize a third time, that I strongly support my schools decision to teach us programming using Champ. Two articles about the performance of C# compared to C(++,) I found: msdn.microsoft[döt]com/msdnmag/issues/04/03/ScientificC/ blogs.msdn[döt]com/jonathanh/archive/2005/05/20/420634.aspx

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