The choice of which programming language to use in introductory computer science courses borders on being a religious issue in which divides computer science departments over issues involving what are believed to be practical skills required by industry and the requirements of pedagogy. More often, in the past, industrial requirements have prevailed as witnessed by the use of languages such as Cobol, FORTRAN, PL/I and more recently C and C++. Languages have been developed which have, in part, focused on education, i.e. Pascal, Modula, etc., but these languages have not become a dominant force in the commercial production of software. At least one computer scientist [Di 89] has advocated the use of an unimplemented programming language to teach computer science which necessarily forces programming instruction to be purely an intellectual activity. Recent growth in Internet activity has provided stimulus for the development of software systems which may be executed on a variety of different hardware/software environments. One of these, Java, which uses an abstract Java virtual machine to host the software is remarkably similar in overall concept to the Pascal P machine. Because of Internet popularity, Java is now proposed by some as a suitable vehicle for teaching computer science. Trends or fads come and go in computer science education just as in other fields. This paper attempts to re-address an old topic, using a different approach than has been used in the past.
In each of the programming languages mentioned above, it is not clear that the choice to use the language for computer science instruction is made primarily for pedagogical reasons. In Section 2, criteria are given which are based on requirements of computer science instruction, particularly use of programming notation in an expository fashion in the teaching of introductory computer science.