MacharSoft COMAL Users' Forum - D Schroeder

Dierk Schrøder (Kiel, Germany) - Another COMAL diehard

Dierk writes:

Dear Macharsoft-Team,

I was pleasantly surprised when I found your website about UniCOMAL. I'm a teacher at a comprehensive school in Kiel (www.kiel.de) in Schleswig-Holstein (northern Germany).

UniComal has been used at many schools in Schleswig-Holstein.

I made my first steps in programming with BASIC on a C64 and later with COMAL for C64, before I began to use UniComal v2.11 in 1988. I have become a "diehard" COMAL-user and now I use the version COMAL 3.11

I'm very interested in your Visual-COMAL development.

I've developed a computer-based-training program named CURT for pupils at primary and secondary schools, written in COMAL v3.11. If you are interested in a demo version of CURT 3.4 you are able to get a free download from my website (www.curtsoft.de). In the next month there will follow other COMAL modules and programs for free download:

MacTurtle - Intended for programming beginners (school pupils at 10 years). With this program teachers "survive" the first 5-10 lessons of programming. It's interesting for German pupils, because the keywords, commands, functions and procedures are written in German.

Zeichnen.mod - With this module, teachers get procedures and functions that make programming with turtle graphics in COMAL much easier. (e.g. the coordinate system is a normal 7X7 system, the listing is visible on the screen together with the drawing)

Help! PCX problem

In the last ten years I solved a lot of problems with COMAL V3.11, but there is one problem I haven't solved up to now:

I can use only 4 bit, 16 colors *.pcx files with loadpcx("*.pcx"). Has anyone written a procedure to load *.pcx files with 256 colors?
[We have been thinking about this one as well, but without any success. Anyone got any ideas? - Ed.]

Uploaded 29-Jan-2000 / Edited 19-June-2001