Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!mailrus!ames!oliveb!pyramid!decwrl!labrea!csli!kasper From: kasper@csli.STANFORD.EDU (Kasper Osterbye) Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth Subject: Re: Forth and Children ? Message-ID: <3463@csli.STANFORD.EDU> Date: 12 Apr 88 18:45:45 GMT References: <27521@felix.UUCP> <4342@cup.portal.com> <3380@haddock.ISC.COM> Reply-To: kasper@csli.UUCP (Kasper Osterbye) Organization: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford U. Lines: 20 In article boris@charon.mit.edu (Boris N Goldowsky) writes: >In article <3380@haddock.ISC.COM> karl@haddock.ISC.COM (Karl Heuer) >mentioned Logo and Comal as other good learning languages - I'd never >heard of the latter (what's it like?) Without going into a comal discussion in this Forth newsgroup, I will try give an answer: Comal is developed in Denmark by a highscool teacher who did not want his students to learn/put up with BASIC. It is interactive to the same degree as BASIC, global variables can be set and read interactivly. Its structure is close to pascal, only with no datatypes. It datatypes is closer to BASIC (rather good strings, arrays and %interger and real). As someone said, there are turtle graphics, and I believe that one can write a procedure, and call it directly from the prompt (like lisp, logo and Forth). It does recursion with local variables. It was the first thing I ever learned, and I can warmly recommend it for a first encounter to programming. --Kasper.