steven@cwi.nl (Steven Pemberton) (10/11/90)
[ Moderator's comment: enclosed follows an excerpt of a much longer article submitted to me, which was also cross-posted to the unmoderated newsgroups: comp.lang.misc, comp.sys.atari.st, and comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc. If the topic interests you, please look for the complete article in one of those groups, or you can obtain it with FTP from RASCAL.ICS.UTEXAS.EDU, file "ABC-list_announce" in directory "mac/csma-support" (where I plan to keep all articles I post available for FTP so you can retrieve them at a later time after already expired from your news-direc- tories... ---Werner ] A mailing list has been formed for discussions about the programming language ABC. If you'd like to join, please send a message, including your preferred email address, to abc-list-request@cwi.nl To submit articles, you can send them to abc-list@cwi.nl Steven Pemberton, abc-list administriviator, steven@cwi.nl WHAT IS ABC This is a quick overview of the programming language ABC and its implementations, and gives a few examples of ABC programs. Full documentation about ABC is in the ABC Programmer's Handbook (details below). THE LANGUAGE ABC is an imperative language originally designed as a replacement for BASIC: interactive, very easy to learn, but structured, high-level, and easy to use. ABC has been designed iteratively, and the present version is the 4th iteration. The previous versions were called B (not to be confused with the predecessor of C). It is suitable for general everyday programming, the sort of programming that you would use BASIC, Pascal, or AWK for. It is not a systems-programming language. It is an excellent teaching language, and because it is interactive, excellent for prototyping. It is much faster than 'bc' for doing quick calculations. [... the rest was deleted by your moderator.... ]