ABC programming language

From ArticleWorld


ABC is a high-level, general purpose, imperative programming language and programming environment. ABC was developed by Leo Geurts, Lambert Meertend and Steven Pemberton at CWI, Holland. It is intended to be as simple as possible, so that it can be used even instead of simple, educational languages like BASIC, AWK or Pascal.

ABC is a structured programming language designed mainly for teaching programming. The programming system is monolithic, making it rather hard to extend, and does not have a direct access to the operating system functions, file system or the hardware it runs on.

ABC is important because it has greatly influenced the Python language, as Guido van Rossum, Python's creator, worked on the ABC system for a long time. ABC is currently available as an interpreter and a compiler, on several platforms, including Unix, DOS and Mac.

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Examples

The typical Hello, World program is very simple to write in ABC: 

WHILE (1=1) :
    WRITE "Hello World"

Procedures can be introduced using the simple HOW TO statement, like this: 

HOW TO GET command:
   GET LINE
   WHILE command = "": GET LINE

GET LINE:
   WRITE '> '
   READ command RAW
   PUT lower stripped command IN command
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