This document is not intended for absolute beginners working without any help. Having a working Pop-11 system and the VED editor makes it much easier to learn the language by trying out the examples and varying them.
Many beginners do best by working on mini-projects at a computer terminal. After a few weeks of practical experience, such people may find this document useful for revision purposes, and as a way of learning more about Pop-11 more quickly than by working through interactive `TEACH files'. In case the reader has access to a full Poplog system, brief information about the online files is presented here.
TEACH files are read using the editor, invoked by the TEACH command. Usually the first command is
teach teachwhich introduces the use of VED reading teach files.
Since the editor allows two (or on some terminals more) files to be visible at once on the screen it is often convenient to learn about programming by having a teach file and a user file visible at the same time. The teach files give information, examples of programs, and suggestions for practical exercises.
The following interactive `TEACH' files, provided with Poplog introduce the use of the editor VED, and its role in developing programs.
TEACH TEACH
TEACH VED
TEACH VEDPOP
TEACH MARK
TEACH LMR (=Load Marked Range)
For an absolute beginner, with no experience of programming, the
following TEACH files provide a succession of mini-projects which
introduce both AI concepts and Pop-11 programming techniques:
TEACH RIVER
TEACH RESPOND
TEACH RIVER2
TEACH RIVERCHAT
More general introductions to Pop-11 facilities are provided by
additional teach files, many of whose contents overlap considerably with
this primer. An overview of currently available TEACH files is provided
by
TEACH TEACHFILESThere are usually additional files available from Universities that use Poplog for teaching, e.g. Sussex and Birmingham. E.g. teach files from Birmingham are available via ftp at
ftp://ftp.cs.bham.ac.uk/pub/dist/poplog/teach