Functional Programming on a PC

Miranda on a PC

It is possible for students to buy a version of Miranda which will run on a PC, but only if the PC runs the LINUX operating system instead of DOS and Windows. The LINUX version of Miranda is available at a special student price of 49 pounds per copy, including VAT and delivery on 3.5" floppy disk (US price $69). It is available on a cheque-with-order basis from Research Software Limited, 23 St Augustines Road, Canterbury, Kent CT1 1XP. Alternatively, you can send email to mira-request@ukc.ac.uk

Miranda for Linux requires about 1Mb of disk space. LINUX is free, but I don't know how much disk space it requires. You can get LINUX by using ftp to connect to src.doc.ic.ac.uk and then changing directory to computing/operating-systems/Linux. In that directory you will see lots of subdirectories containing different versions of Linux (I think). I don't know which is best.

Past students have commented as follows:

• Linux may be transferred at some expense of time from a number of ftp sites. There are also a number of companies that provide Linux, plus technical support, plus hard-copy documentation - at a price. One of these has put its latest Linux package on the cover CD-ROM of the October [1993] issue of PC-Plus which has a cover price of L3.95. A number of students have had some degree of success with installing this package to the extent of starting up X Windows without frying their video adapters :-)
• Hmm, ..... you have to reformat and partition your hard drive for linux and then get it working..... I just can't afford the disk space. I know there are things such as stacker and doublespace or whatever it is called, but why should I slooow down my machine for the sake of an extra 40% disk space (practically all you get because after the "virtual" disk is 70% full I get disk full errors when I try to copy a 2k file on to the disk)

Gofer on a PC

An alternative to Miranda, but only for students who consider themselves confident with programming, is to use the language "gofer" on a PC. Gofer will run on DOS and Windows, I believe. It will also run on a Mac and on the Atari ST. However, gofer is NOT Miranda - they are similar, but they are not the same. You need to be confident in order to cope with the differences between the two languages.

Gofer is available on the ISD machines. The files are in the directory

~ucaccdc/gofer

This directory contains two files called README.unix and README.notunix. They are the same file, but the latter is properly formatted for a DOS machine whereas the former is properly formatted for reading on a UNIX machine. YOU SHOULD READ THIS FILE. The directory also has three subdirectories for mac, dos and st. Choose whichever you need and copy the appropriate subdirectory to a floppy to take home.

Past students have commented:

• ...if you are good with miranda then you may get along fine with it. I only ever used it for testing ideas. PS latest version of Gofer has arrays ;-) for all you hackers out there
• ...I wanted to ... make sure that people using DOS put a set environment instruction in their c:\autoexec.bat (file or somewhere else appropriate) to tell gofer which editor to use and where to find it. A suitable command for users of the edlin editor would be:-

          SET EDITOR=C:\DOS\EDLIN.EXE
  

  or perhaps

          SET EDITOR=C:\DOS\EDLIN.COM
  

  depending on the DOS version being used.

  I have used gofer with some success even within a DOS window under windows 3.1.