Phrogram

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Tic Tac Toe
Tic Tac Toe

Phrogram (formerly Kid's Programming Language, or KPL) is a programming language designed to be understandable and appealing to children. Version 1 was released in August 2005, and Version 2 is now the latest release. It was designed and released by Morrison Schwartz, Inc.

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[edit] Technical overview

Phrogram is a procedural programming language bearing some similarities to Visual Basic, and Phrogram source can be automatically ported to VB.NET or C# source with the packaged IDE. The language supports a number of scalar and complex data types, including structures, but the present version does not support the definition of objects.

Phrogram is tightly integrated with and currently only available for the Microsoft Windows series of operating systems. The latest version, 2.0, only works on Windows 2000 and above. It is thus not usable to teach programming on other operating systems or teach the concept of portable programming.

A Phrogram program is a collection of nested code blocks. On the highest level is a Program block, and within this Method blocks and Function blocks are defined. Functions and Methods in KPL are both chunks of reusable code, available in the Program scope; Functions return values, while Methods may not. Data structures are defined within the Program scope. Variables must be declared and typed at the time of declaration.

The language is closely tied to the Microsoft .NET Framework and provides many runtime functions and methods for interacting with the platform. The easy portability between Phrogram and other .NET languages has led Microsoft to promote Phrogram as a successor teaching language to Visual BASIC.[dubious — see talk page] The language is promoted on Channel 9 and MSDN, and the company that presently distributes the language, Morrison-Schwartz, is part-owned by Jon Schwartz, a former program manager for Microsoft.

[edit] Hello, World! in KPL

Program Hello_World
    Method Main()
        PrintLine ("Hello, World")
    End Method
End Program

[edit] Philosophy

Spinning Orbs
Spinning Orbs

Jonah Stagner started development on KPL when he started to teach his own children how to program and found that the currently available choices of tools and technology were simply not as beginner-friendly as they needed to be. Since then Jonah, Jon Schwartz and Walt Morrison, have taken KPL from those early stages to a globally successful product in less than a year.[citation needed] Their primary goal is to produce a programming language that makes learning to program easy and fun. Phrogram (successor to KPL) immediately captures a novice's interest by the ease with which one can write attractive multi-media programs with eye-catching graphics, music, sound effects, and animations.

A secondary goal for Phrogram is to provide a modern language with several of the features of languages such as C++, Java, Visual Basic and C#, and Visual Basic syntax, to make the transition into those languages as easy as possible. The latest version of KPL, was renamed as Phrogram, supports object-oriented programming (OOP), Phrogram allows for definition of classes and their associated properties and methods, which provides beginning programmers with an introduction to OOP programming.

To accomplish their goals, Phrogram's developers built Version 2 upon the recent .NET Framework Version 2 which was itself released in November 2005. KPL version 2 intends to be fully compatible with other languages that use the .NET Framework, so that runtime libraries can be shared in either direction.

[edit] Other information

Phrogram is freeware that has (as of April 25, 2006) been downloaded over 80,000 times (including KPL downloads). Phrogram’s user interface is available in 18 languages: English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, German, French, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Thai, Greek, Polish, Romanian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Danish, Czech and Catalan. KPL’s website is currently available in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian, Norwegian, Swedish, Dutch and Danish. All non-English translations have been provided by a global community of volunteers, and the company encourages users to translate it.

Random Rectangles
Random Rectangles

Although KPL was originally designed with 10- to 14-year-old kids in mind (hence the name “Kid's Programming Language”), it is appropriate for beginning programmers of any age, and hence the name change. It is currently in use by many older people who have downloaded it for themselves, rather than for their children or their students.[citation needed] Phrogram is suitable for a first programming course at any level of education, and is being used by primary and secondary schools and in universities in many countries, including the US, Britain, Canada, Mexico, Columbia, Russia, Iceland, Sweden, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Portugal, Brazil, China, Guam, the Philippines and New Zealand.[citation needed]

[edit] The Phrogram Company

KPL version 2 was released, renamed as Phrogram. The new community site is up and hopping at The Phrogram Company. The new site is also based on Community Server technology, the same that Channel9 uses.

[edit] External links

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