PAL--A Language Designed for Teaching Programming Linguistics.

This paper describes PAL--a new computer language. It is used as a pedagogical vehicle in an undergraduate subject called "Programming Linguistics." This subject is designed primarily for sophomores who anticipate a major professional interest in computer science and has two objectives. The first is to study linguistic constructs for the specification of algorithms, and students are expected to learn some of the interesting and important intellectual ideas which are relevant to programming languages. (Examples of such ideas are the application of a new function to arguments, the "creation" of new variables and allocation of their storage, the updating of the value associated with a variable, etc.) PAL was designed to reveal clearly these various intellectual ideas with a minimum of syntactic decoration and a maximum of semantic clarity. The second objective of the subject is that the students improve their proficiency in computer programming. PAL is an adequately clean and powerful programming language that can readily be used by the students to perform fairly complex programming exercises as homework. (Author/DO)