ActionScript as a teaching language

[William Park]

On Sat, Dec 31, 2005 at 08:53:50PM -0500, Christopher Browne wrote:
> On 12/31/05, Peter <plp-ysDPMY98cNQDDBjDh4tngg at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> > It looks like Horn clauses. Or like C-notation lambda expressions
> > with ':-', ',', '.' and ';' replacing a lot of parentheses. Or like
> > plain math function descriptions. Which are more or less the same
> > thing. Be f(x) = {x for x>=0, -x for x<0 }. Except the functions can
> > be symbolic.  neighbors(A,B,[L]) = { ... }. Writing a simple parser
> > that parses a problem setup as above into valid Prolog is failry
> > easy and could be a part of the default library. More importantly
> > Prolog can explain what it is doing while running. With a simple
> > filter to reduce the verbosity of a trace or explain it should be
> > very helpful.
> >
> > I don't think that this is a crazy idea. According to links posted
> > on this list yesterday, using the highest level available language
> > is the best idea. Prolog is certainly high level. For non-symbolic
> > calculus only maybe Matlab or Scilab could be considered.
> 
> Another option would be Erlang.
> 
> It has much of the "Prolog nature," notably including the notion that
> data is immutable, once values have been determined.  In effect, you
> don't have "variables;" you bind values to names.
> 
> Unlike Prolog, which generally tries to be as near as possible to
> untyped (sort of like Perl and Tcl), Erlang is strongly typed.  It is
> similar to ML in that type information can commonly be inferred; you
> often do not need to declare the types.
> 
> And there are substantial applications written in Erlang; Ericsson has
> been known to implement phone switches in the language, which is an
> enormously-parallel application if there ever was one.

It boggles rational mind that such esoteric languagues could even be
mentioned in the context of High School computer cirriculum.

-- 
William Park <opengeometry-FFYn/CNdgSA at public.gmane.org>, Toronto, Canada
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