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Note: ALICE was a commercial product in the 1980s. It is now free, however no support is available. |
Alice was designed to make a programmer's life easier. The Alice environment has everything needed to produce good quality programs: an editor, an interpreter, a debugger, and a wide variety of on-line documentation. Alice also offers a number of capabilities that are not usually found in a computing environment. The most important of these is that Alice makes it impossible to create a program that has a syntax error. This eliminates many of the mechanical difficulties of programming, particularly for beginners and for inexpert typists.
The first Alice package implements the Pascal programming language. Pascal was chosen because it is a modern language that supports the structures needed for structured programming. It is also an all-purpose language, in wide use as a teaching language, as well as in scientific and commercial applications. Alice packages for other languages will be on the way soon.
This guide serves as an introduction to the use of the Alice Pascal package for those who are already familiar with Pascal, but who have never used Alice. If you do not fit this description, you may want to reference either the User Guide, or, if it is made available, our textook:
By Jim Gardner. An introduction to Pascal and Alice for people who have no previous programming experience. It is designed for self-learning or classroom use, with exercises and explorations into Pascal, Alice, and computers in general. This book is now only available online.
Programmers may also want to read other tutorials or reference manuals for the Pascal language itself. You will find many such guides in any store that sells computer reference books. Of interest might be the WATCOM Pascal Tutorial and Reference Manual by F.D.Boswell, T.R.Grove, and J.W.Welch, WATCOM Publications, 1983. This describes the version of Pascal that Alice implements. It may still be available.