ALGOL-E: An Experimental Approach to The Study of Programming Languages

A common approach to the teaching of Program-ming 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 ca