Pico (programming language)

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Pico is a programming language developed at the Software Languages Lab at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, intended to be simple, powerful, extensible, and easy to read.^[1] The language was created to introduce the essentials of programming to non-computer science students.

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.

While designing Pico, the Software Languages 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.

De Meuter, Gonzalez, and D'Hondt describe the Pico syntax as being "two-tiered."^[1] The first layer consists of simple rules for writing small programs in a functional programming style.

Comments are surrounded by backquotes ("`").

Variables are dynamically typed; Pico uses static scope.

var: value

Functions, like everything in Pico, are first-class objects, meaning they can be assigned to variables and passed to and returned from functions. Also, there are no anonymous functions in Pico; functions must have a name.^[1] For example, a function, func, with two parameters, param1 and param2, can be defined as:

func(param1, param2): ...

Functions can be called with the following syntax:

func(arg1, arg2)

Operators can be used as prefix or infix in Pico:

+(5, 2)
5 + 2

Pico has the following types: string, integer, real and tables.

It does not have a native char type, so users should resort to size 1 strings.

Tables are compound data structures that may contain any of the regular data types.

Boolean types are represented by functions (as in lambda calculus).

Only the usual if statement is included

if(condition, then, else)

display('Hello World', eoln)

max(a, b):
 if(a < b, b, a)

`http://www.paulgraham.com/accgen.html`
foo(n): fun(i): n := n+i

• MacPico
• XPico

• WinPico This version is buggy
• WinPico stable

• TextPico for Linux

• sPico for DrScheme

• Official website
• Software Languages Lab
• Department of Computer Science at VUB
• VUB
• The Infogroep Pico page