Category:ABC

Official website
Execution method:	Interpreted
Garbage collected:	Yes
Parameter passing methods:	By value, reference
Type safety:	Safe
Type strength:	Strong;
Type expression:	Implicit
Type checking:	Dynamic
See Also:	ABC on the HOPL; ;

ABC is a programming language and development environment developed for teaching purposes at the National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science in the Netherlands in the late 80s. It was meant to be a replacement for BASIC in teaching programming to students. The language was meant to be used interactively. Instead of traditional source files, the environment uses workspaces, though the UNIX version does have (rather minimal) script support. Function definitions and global variables persist from session to session without the user having to explicitly save or load them. The environment furthermore includes autocompletion and a syntax-aware editor. There is no supported way to access the underlying OS or file system directly. The tight integration between the language implementation and the IDE turned out to be a barrier to expansion, and the language was largely abandoned in the early 90s.

There is an unfortunate bug in the official interpreter: it switches to the alternate terminal screen even when running a non-interactive script, resulting in the output being invisible. A workaround is to specify a terminal type that does not support it, e.g. TERM=vt100 abc script.abc.