Dear all,
I am a Computer science teacher and each year I have many students (aged 13-18) participating in the greek national programming contest. As a pascal fan myself I have always insisted on teaching pascal for this is the best options for beginners + it is a great option for more advanced students/programmers.
My only other serious option is C++ (because of the STL). Everything works well when i use pascal for beginners, every year that is. But when a student is getting better he/she has to proceed to C++ because of not having the same tools as STL provides to a C++ user. Very few to none of the top coders use pascal in the national programming contests and the International Olympiad in Informatics.
This is a huge loss of time. Instead of focusing on algorithms and data stractures they have to study C++, STL.
I believe that a great step forward the acceptance of Free Pascal in Education can be the development of the fcl-stl library. As I believe it is preinstalled in the 2.7. versions. When there will be a stable version for this? Is there any fcl-stl manual? The organizers of the International Olympiad in Informatics (this year held in Taiwan) can be formaly informed about this, a press release maybe as well? Also for the next academic year every major national programming contest organization should be informed too I believe. If there is anyone that has any ideas of how can I help in the development of this project please tell me so.
cheers,
Dinos, Greece