FOIL (programming language)

This article is about programming languages. For other types of foil, see Foil (disambiguation).

FOIL was the name for two different programming languages.

CAI style language

The first FOIL was a CAI language developed at the University of Michigan in 1967. The acronym stood for File-Oriented Interpretive Language and it was very similar to other CAI languages like COURSEWRITER and PILOT. However, it tried to make the language somewhat block-structured using whitespace which ended up making the language vaguely similar to BASIC or ABC.

Example


 :START COUNT=0
 TY Enter the number of times you want to repeat the statement:
 ACCEPT
 MAX=NUMBER.(1)
 :LOOP
 TY This loop has run #COUNT times it will terminate when it runs #MAX times
 IF COUNT<MAX,
    COUNT=COUNT+1
    GO TO :LOOP
 TY Do you want to do this again?
 ACCEPT
 IF 'yes', GO TO START
 IF 'no' GO TO FINISH
 :FINISH
 TY Goodbye!
 STOP

Music generation language

The second FOIL was a music generation language for the Touché computer instrument in 1979. The Touché was a keyboard that had digital tone generation and allowed you to program software for performances. The acronym stood for Far Out Instrument Language and was succeeded by MetaFOIL and FOIL-83. The language was developed by David Rosenboom and was based on Forth.

External links

Information on David Rosenboom's music software
FOIL - a file oriented interpretive language article at the ACM digital library

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