Welcome to PILOT Programming Language Page

Introduction to PILOT

Programmed, Instruction, Learning, Or Teaching(PILOT) is a simple historic programming language developed in 1960. PILOT is a programming language designed for the use of education. Pilot was fairly popular on early home computer home computer systems. Pilot is a simple imperative language designed for building textual computer aided instruction systems. It is highly field oriented, each line is either a command or a label. All commands have same structure consist of a keyword, and text.

The core keywords are:

  • TYPE-output some text
  • ACCEPT- read an input string
  • MATCH- compare input to a pattern
  • JUMP- goto another part of the program
  • USE- call another part of the program as subroutine)
  • COMPUTE- assign a value to a string variable
  • END- return from a use
  • YES- ouput some text if an answer was yes
  • NO- output some text if an answer was no

Accept input into "accept buffer". Examples:

R:Next line of input replaces current contents of accept buffer A: R:Next line of input replaces accept buffer, and string variable 'FREE' A:$FREE R:Next 3 lines of input assigned to string variables 'X', 'Y' and 'Z' A:$X,$Y,$Z R:Numeric input assigned to numeric variable "Q" A:#Q

DATATYPES:

  PILOT support two data types are string and variables. All variables are dynamically scoped.