Pico programming language
Pico is a programming language developed at the PROG lab at the dutch-speaking Free University of Brussels (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, VUB). The language was created to introduce the essentials of programming to non computer science students.
Pico can be seen as an effort to generate a palatable and enjoyable language for people who don't want to study hard for the elegance and power of a language. They've done it by adapting Scheme's semantics.
While designing Pico, the PROG lab was inspired by the Abelson and Sussman's book "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs". Furthermore they were influenced by the teaching of programming at high school or academic level.
Pico should be interpreted as 'small', the idea was to create a small language for educational purposes.
Language Elements
Comments
Comments are surrounded by a backquote (`).
Variables
Variables are dynamically typed, pico uses a static scope.
var: value
Functions
Functions are string, integer, real and tables.
It does not have a native char type, so users should resort to size 1 strings.
Tables are compound datastructures that may contain any of the regular datatypes.
Boolean types are represented by functions, in the same way as lambda calculus does.
Control Structures
Conditional Evaluation
Only the usual if statement is included
if(condition, then, else)
Code Snippets
display('Hello World', eoln)
max(a, b):
if(a < b, b, a)
Implementations
Mac OS / Mac OS X
Windows
Linux
