PFORD Language An Overview Bhagyashree Bohra Deepti Jindal group leader Sharib Khan Shringika Porwal Introduction PFORD programming for dummies is a language targeting both novice and advanced programmers The motivation behind PFORD is to provide an easy to learn easy to understand language which can be used by novices to quickly familiarize themselves with the art of programming and logical thinking High level languages like C and Java often present a formidable challenge to novices who get bogged down by the non intuitive presentation of the languages One has to spend substantial time just understanding the syntax before being able to write a single line of code PFORD has been designed to overcome this learning curve by using an easy to understand and self explanatory syntax and semantics The language employs simple representative English words in the syntax and permits specification of statements that are akin to describing the algorithm to solve the problem at hand This simplicity will enable a novice to solve problems using high level concepts and not worry too much about the programming details PFORD also has another neat feature The compiler can be instructed to generate equivalent code in any of the popular languages like Java and C A user can easily learn PFORD and simply translate to C or Java without having to spend time learning the corresponding languages Language PFORD is a simple intuitive easy to learn user friendly and a powerful language which also has the capability to translate into other high level popular languages 1 Ease of Use The goal of PFORD was to build a system that would be simple for the advanced as well as the novice user Each language has its own advantages and one may be more suitable than the rest for a project Programming with PFORD the user needs to write a program only once and then can generate the corresponding Java or C code by setting a flag at the beginning of the program It will be possible to test the result over each platform to observe which of them provides the most optimal result We also wanted to simplify the process of learning programming for beginners By making syntax of the commands similar to English language we have eliminated many of the confusing features of Java C and have made it easier for the user with minimal programming experience to comprehend PFORD For example a loop in C Java for int i 0 i MAX VALUE i PFORD is syntactically much simpler and visually much easier to understand loop till MAX VALUE Object Oriented PFORD will allow the user the capacity of creating user defined classes and let the user generate instances of their objects This feature will provide the capability of building customized data types which can be reused making programming easier Powerful PFORD offers a beginner the power to perform complex tasks by writing fewer lines of code This language provides compact commands to perform complex mathematical and string manipulation operations and also allows the creation of user defined objects Using PFORD the programmer has the ability to translate code to Java or C making it a powerful tool Efficient PFORD was created to save time and resources for experienced programmers and to eliminate the burden of learning complex languages for the novice users A single language can now be used to generate code in any of the commonly used high level languages Customizable Not only does PFORD provide the ability to translate C Java but the user can also run their program with this compiler It can be used to create customized objects classes and functions 2 Robust PFORD has been developed as a dependable language It allows compile time checks to detect the errors that would be found by C and Java before generating the corresponding code thus preventing errors while running the programs on their respective platforms Another feature of PFORD is that memory management is inherently handled by Java thereby eliminating problems related to memory leaks and making PFORD more robust Architecture neutral PFORD code is compiled to Java code which is interpreted by Java Virtual Machine JVM JVM is a machine independent platform this makes Java portable to virtually any machine As PFORD is based on Java this provides PFORD the quality of being architecture neutral PFORD Compiled code can be executed on any processor platform wherever JVM will run Data Types PFORD supports several data types such as integer float char and string These data types follow the same fundamental pattern as C Java In addition user defined objects classes arrays and hashes are also provided Arrays are used to represent any of the data types listed above Basic Functions Libraries The three basic libraries in PFORD are math sorting and I O file Some of the functions supported include cosine sine log pi square root floor ceiling and sorts on integer and string arrays Interpreted The lexer and parser will be created using ANTLR ANTLR will generate the required information for PFORD interpreter to execute the user s program Since PFORD language is not compiled to machine code it s interpreter will work the same on all the platforms and architectures Sample Code A sample program in PFORD that does translation would look like startofprogram Generate C Variable a type int 3 a 0 Loop 10 runs Increment a Output Final value a endofprogram When this program will be run it will output the corresponding C code void main int a a 0 for int i i 11 i a cout Final value a endl An example of a program that will run in PFORD would look like indicates the beginning of the program startofprogram Include library math lib Integer a n 0 Decimal b 0 Boolean c 0 defines an array of integers Array Integer d array 1 2 3 5 6 Looping and adding a to itself 10 times Loop 10 runs a Output a Conditional statements if valid b 0 then do b b 1 0 else do b b 0 1 0 Conditional loops while valid c 0 loop through 4 c 1 loop through c 0 while valid c 1 Looping till we reach a stopping value loop till a 20 a Iterative for loop loop from n 0 till n 10 changing n n 1 Output n calls the sort function of the math library with the array as an argument call function sort with args d array indicates the end of the program endofprogram The italics indicate keywords in the language Since the reference manual is still not complete the final syntax used may differ slightly Future In the words of Alfred North Whitehead Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can
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