9350708 Epstein The aim of the undergraduate computer science curriculum is to provide quality, pre-professional training for students, most of whom will become practitioners of computing. Improvements have been made in the undergraduate curriculum that emphasize the following aspects of software development: rigorous thinking at a high level of abstraction, formal specifications and design techniques, use of state-of-the-art software development tools, and cooperative work. Many of these objectives are encouraged by migration away from the procedural (or imperative) language paradigm embodied by Pascal towards the object-oriented paradigm embodied in C++ and Common Lisp (with CLOS). This project aims to establish an undergraduate laboratory that supports these curriculum changes. This undergraduate laboratory enables students to use object-- oriented programming environments running on the UNIX platform. These environments (specifically, ObjectCenter for C++, Allegro Composer for CLOS and ObjectStore for object-oriented data- bases) enable students to utilize the sort of visual software engineering environments that are becoming commonplace in industry. Such environments are especially important for object-oriented systems development where developers are confronted with the enormous complexity of large numbers of related classes and interacting objects. This project also encourages the use of modern telecommunications to support cooperative work among students, electronic interaction between students and faculty, and student access to the larger intellectual community over newsgroups.
