My main reason for asking the question was to try to find out if there would be any interest in a modern primer, based on GPC, as an introduction to scientific programming. Years ago, with a colleague, we talked of writing a book entitled 'Brute force programming' which was designed for scientists. The design cycle was based on our appreciation of the fact that for our modelling work most of the time was spent on the development of the code, and only a small proportion spent on production running. This meant that we weren't concerned with saving bytes or running efficiently. All we wanted was to get our ideas coded and tested as conveniently (for us) as we could manage. We were teaching ISO Pascal level 0 at the time and thought that this would be the ideal language for our purposes. I am not sure that there is enough interest to make it worthwhile, or indeed, if our irresponsible approach would be valued by the wider programming community.
John O.