[Bluej-discuss] Terminal Window in 2.1.2...

[Chuck Iverson]

I'm running BlueJ 2.1.2 on a Mac with OS 10.4.5 and I can type  
System.out.println("Hello") in either the CodePad or inside a class  
and it gets printed fine in the terminal window.

I don't understand the problem Gordon is referring to.

On Mar 14, 2006, at 6:00 PM, Gordon Royle wrote:

> A little while ago I saw the discussion on "Problems with Console
> Window" but didn't really have time to follow it up or grasp the  
> impact.
>
> But now I realise that
>
> 	System.out.println("Hello");
>
> no longer works in BlueJ 2.1.2.
>
> On my system (Mac OS 10.4.5), this statement has no discernible
> effect - nothing appears on the terminal window, but there are no
> error messages or anything else. I think that this will cause
> students a lot of problems... if code that they type in from
> somewhere else just silently fails, then I am sure that they will
> blame BlueJ and simply give up.
>
>
>
> Thanks to the previously posted message, I gather that we are now
> meant to do
>
> Writer w = new OutputStreamWrite(System.out, "UTF-8");
> w.write("Hello\n");
>
>
> But of course, you can't do this...
>
> You have to import java.io, and THEN you have the wrap the whole lot
> up in a try/catch block....  THEN you have to explain that anything
> declared inside a try/catch block must be USED inside the try/catch
> block or it is out-of-scope...
>
>
>
> In my humble opinion, this is a major backward step - one of my
> primary motivations for using BlueJ was that it protects the
> beginning user from much of the complexity involved in Java. It means
> that the instructor can avoid the usual problem of saying "Just put
> these things here that you don't understand and we'll explain them in
> Week 12" when trying to teach the old-fashioned "public static void
> main(String[] args)" way...
>
> But now, if I want a program to write something out, then I have to
> give them a whole pile of OTHER magic words to include.
>
> Maybe using the terminal AT ALL is old-fashioned, and the right thing
> to do is simply to return everything as a String. But it is darned
> convenient to be able to quickly bung down a few System.out.println()
> statements to check that things are working properly. And it is quite
> inexplicable to students that a statement compiles and runs but HAS
> NO EFFECT.
>
>
> I would VERY STRONGLY ENCOURAGE the BlueJ team to rethink this
> change, and maybe make it a user-selectable option and to set it OFF
> by default.
>
> Opinions?
>
> Gordon
>
>
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