ALGOL-E: An Experimental Approach to The Study of Programming Languages
Gary A. Kildall, Alan B. Roberts · 1972
A common approach to the teaching of Programming Languages (course 12, Curriculum 68) has been to teach several languages, each demonstrating-a feature deemed significant, such as ALGOL, LISP, SNOBOL, and COBOL [3,7]. The problem that exists with this method is that far too much time is spent learning the details necessary to use the languages, leaving time for only a few trivial programs in each language. A popular alternative to this approach is to teach the course using a single general-purpose language which has a broad repertoire of language features, such as PL/I. While this method successfully avoids much of the detail which characterizes the former, it too seems to have a serious drawback. The student can become quite talented at programming in the language and still have very little feel for the implications of the higher level language structur~ at the machine level. Moreover, these languages 'typically provide no means by which the student can readily investigate these implications. Hence, ALGOL-E is proposed as a programming language system which provides such a capability.