PAL—a language designed for teaching programming linguistics

• Authors: Arthur Evans, Jr.
• Venue: ACM '68 Proceedings of the 1968 23rd ACM national conference
• Year: 1968

This paper describes PAL—a new computer language. Given the fact that new languages seem to appear in computer literature at the rate of several per month, it seems incumbent on one who creates a new language to justify having done so. In the present case, there are two important considerations: control and specification. Let us consider each of these in turn. By virtue of our having designed PAL, it is ours. There is no PAL Users Group or Committee of Vested Interests concerned with retaining upward compatibility with what was done last year (or last month). This doesn't mean we change the specifications of the language every few weeks (our students are, in a real sense, our Committee of Vested Interests), but it does mean we can make decisions on changes solely on technical grounds. More important, though, we can design the language to meet the criteria we think important. For example, the language almost demands interpretive execution. Since no one writes production programs in PAL we are able to put up with inefficiencies in the implementation that would otherwise be intolerable. Thus we have designed our own language so that we will have control over it.