|
Pico is a programming language developed at the PROG lab at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. The language was created to introduce the essentials of programming to non computer science students. A programming language is an artificial language that can be used to control the behavior of a machine, particularly a computer. ...
The Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) is a Flemish university situated in Brussels, Belgium. ...
Pico can be seen as an effort to generate a palatable and enjoyable language for people who do not want to study hard for the elegance and power of a language. They have done it by adapting Scheme's semantics. The Scheme programming language is a functional programming language and a dialect of Lisp. ...
Semantics (Greek semantikos, giving signs, significant, symptomatic, from sema, sign) refers to the aspects of meaning that are expressed in a language, code, or other form of representation. ...
While designing Pico, the PROG lab was inspired by the Abelson and Sussman's book "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs". Furthermore, they were influenced by the teaching of programming at high school or academic level.
Pico should be interpreted as 'small', the idea was to create a small language for educational purposes.
Language Elements Comments Comments are surrounded by a backquote ("`"). The grave accent ( ` ) is a diacritic mark used in written Greek, French, Catalan, Welsh, Italian, Vietnamese, Norwegian, Portuguese and other languages. ...
Variables Variables are dynamically typed; pico uses static scope. In computer science and mathematics, a variable is a symbol denoting a quantity or symbolic representation. ...
In computer science, a datatype or data type (often simply a type) is a name or label for a set of values and some operations which one can perform on that set of values. ...
In computer programming in general, a scope is an enclosing context. ...
var: value
Functions Functions are first-class objects in Pico. They can be assigned to variables. For example a function with two arguments arg1 and arg2 can be defined as In computing, a first-class object (also -value, -entity, -citizen), in the context of a particular programming language, is an entity which can be used in programs without restriction (when compared to other kinds of objects in the same language). ...
func(arg1, arg2): ... Functions can be called with the following syntax: func(value1, value2)
Operators Operators can be used as prefix or infix in Pico: +(5, 2) 5 + 2
Data Types Pico has the following types: string, integer, real and tables. In computer programming and some branches of mathematics, strings are sequences of various simple objects. ...
The integers are commonly denoted by the above symbol. ...
In mathematics, the real numbers may be described informally as numbers that can be given by an infinite decimal representation, such as 2. ...
This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...
It does not have a native char type, so users should resort to size 1 strings. Char may mean: A piece of charred substance A character Certain fish in the genus Salvelinus The Char 2C, a tank Char (StarCraft) Tea This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists pages that might otherwise share the same title. ...
Tables are compound datastructures that may contain any of the regular datatypes.
Boolean types are represented by functions, in the same way as lambda calculus does. The lambda calculus is a formal system designed to investigate function definition, function application, and recursion. ...
Control Structures
Conditional Evaluation Only the usual if statement is included if(condition, then, else)
Code Snippets display('Hello World', eoln) max(a, b): if(a < b, b, a) ` http://www.paulgraham.com/accgen.html accgen(n): accfun(num): n + num
Implementations
Mac OS / Mac OS X
Windows - WinPico This version is buggy
- WinPico Stable
Linux
Crossplatform
External links - Pico Homepage
- PROG lab
- Department of Computer Science at VUB
- VUB
- The Infogroep Pico-page
| 
Feeds |
Contact