Blue is an object-oriented programming language that was developed
especially for teaching. It runs in an integrated programming
environment that includes a graphical program structure editor, a text editor,
a debugger, a library browser, and more. It was developed for teaching
obect-oriented concepts to first year students. The Blue language can
be briefly characterised by the following key words:
- Pure object-oriented language
- Blue supports programming only in classes - classes are the
structuring mechanism for all code. It is not a hybrid language
that offers both, procedural and object-based programming.
- Clean, simple, well-defined concepts
- Emphasis in the language design was on the concepts we want
to teach. The important object-oriented concepts are represented
in the language in a clean and simple way.
- Static, "strong" type checking
- Full static type checking.
- Single inheritance
- Genericity (Polymorphism)
- Blue supports both constrained and unconstrained genericity.
- Readable syntax
- The syntax is based on keywords (rather than symbols) and many
programs can be understood by programmers who are not familiar
with the details of Blue. Students can easily learn from example
programs, or look up keywords in a textbook.
- Assertions, pre and postconditions
- Assertions, pre and postconditions are checked by the runtime
system.
- Small
- Although the features mentioned above are powerful, the language
is very small. It can very quickly be learned by programmers
familiar with any other OO language, and students can get to
a point where they feel comfortable with the whole language (not
only a subset).
- Easy-to-use integrated environment
- The environment is essential for first year students. It allows
teachers to concentrate on the language topics without wasting
too much time on operating system problems. It encourages
debugging and testing as part of the development process from
the very beginning on.
- Easy transition to C++ and similar languages
- Blue is similar enough to C++ to make it easy to transfer skills
learned with Blue to C++ programming (or any other imperative
object-oriented language).
- Automatic garbage collection
- Free
- Blue will be available free of charge to everyone. (This includes
the whole environment.)
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