Language Design Essay

Topic Overview

Since the development of Plankalkül back in the 1940s, a large number of programming languages have been designed and implemented - each for its own specific problem domains and made with its own set of design decisions and compromises. For example, there are languages which:
- Are strongly typed and loosely typed,
- Provide support for object orientation / abstraction of data types,
- Use static or dynamic scoping rules,
- Provide memory management (i.e. garbage collection) or allow the developer fine-grained control over heap-allocation and recycling,
- Provide closures to allow functions to be passed around like variables,
- Allow easy access to array slices and those which do not,
- Perform internal correctness checking of data and/or try/catch exception handling and those which do not,
- Provide diverse and comprehensive suites of built-in functionality and those with a more limited set of features,
- Use pre-processors and macros to selectively expand or substitute source code, etc.

Each of these decisions can have a profound effect on the usefulness of a programming language in terms of factors such as its speed, robustness and general suitability to create programs of a certain type, such as for operating systems, or in the areas of business, scientific computation, artificial intelligence or video games.

The topic of your essay is to design a programming language for the problem domain of:

Education Sector

The education sectors require many applications to handle a wide variety of different tasks. So a programming language suitable for this domain must be able to do things like:
- Have comprehensive support for user interfaces (i.e. GUIs),
- Be able to model real-world problems using custom data types (i.e. support abstraction),
- Provide the ability to send and receive data to/from servers or other devices,
- Be able to handle course-registration related tasks, for example: students enrollment, registration and grading systems
- Be able to handle online learning management related tasks,

- Can handle transactions in payments, for example, paying tuition fee etc.
- Allow for the use of rich multimedia capabilities to enable sound/video playback that allow, for example: creating educational videos, support online lectures, and online conference meetings etc.

Education sector encompasses a number of areas including aspects of academic enrollment and result processing, management of learning and teaching materials, and management of finance. It is worth thinking about the aspects of an education system in terms of a number of features, including:
- Performance;
- Data types and structures;
- Flexibility of design and implementation; and
- Maintenance / Reliability of code;

Even though security aspects are worth considering, the features of the language are the primary concern in this essay. With this in mind your task is to theoretically design a language suitable for the use within the Education domain.

The actual implementation of the language and tool set is obviously outside the scope of this course, but you must express and justify the design decisions behind your programming language in terms of:

- The features and functionality that will allow your language to be suitable and useful within the problem domain (including what differentiates it from existing languages),

- The programming paradigms, such as procedural, object oriented, logic and functional programming.

You are free to design your language to be either interpreted, compiled or to work in a hybrid manner, but you must thoroughly justify your decision. All language design choices must be legitimate, rational decisions which are backed up by robust discussion of the subject area.

In addition, your document should include numerous references to back up any and all specific claims that you make. All references should be made in the APA referencing style.

Your essay should be between 3,000 and 4,000 words inclusive and may contain diagrams or images as you see fit. All diagrams, charts, images or other externally sourced materials incorporated into your essay must be appropriately referenced.

You must supply your completed essay in Microsoft Word DOCX format ONLY.

Assignments will be marked on the basis of fulfilment of the requirements and the quality of the work.

In addition to the marking criteria, marks may be deducted for failure to comply with the assignment requirements, including (but not limited to):
- Incomplete language feature coverage,
- Incomplete submissions (e.g. missing subject areas - see the marking guide),
- Poor spelling and grammar, and
- Incorrect adherence to the APA referencing style.