What is Turing?

[TheTuringTest]

What is Turing? Is it good for learning how to code? Is it connected in any way to Alan Turing?

[SNIPERDUDE]

Turing is/was a language most similar to pascal, and created a great sandbox to learn to code.

It's biggest drawback when compared to similar alternatives such as python was its slower speed. That said it was very easy to get started and was taught by high schools across Ontario for some time.

Holtsoft, the company behind the software eventually went out of business. Not sure of the details, but they're no longer around. It has been carried on however through the OpenTuring project.

Some devs here have pushed it to its limits in all sorts of interesting ways, check out the Turing Submissions section.

Hope that helps


EDIT:

Jumping jetskis, 15 year stars? Time flies.

[TheTuringTest]

Thanks Sniperdude. Can I still use it today for learning to code?

Is Ontario in Canada? It’s funny because I found a book here in the UK for learning to code in Turing.

[SNIPERDUDE]

TheTuringTest @ November 11th 2021, 8:30 am wrote:

Can I still use it today for learning to code?

Yes, can find the downloads page on this forum by clicking the [D] Turing button top of the page under the title banner.

Not sure if you'll need a VM, compatability, mode, or what have you as the software hasn't been updated in many years. The OpenTuring version might work, I haven't kept up with the state of that project.

TheTuringTest @ November 11th 2021, 8:30 am wrote:

Is Ontario in Canada? It’s funny because I found a book here in the UK for learning to code in Turing.

Yup, Ontario is a mainland (no ocean access) province in Canada, next to Quebec. It's cool a Turing book found its way there, though I suppose many move away after done schooling. I moved cross-country myself.

[wtd]

TheTuringTest @ Thu Nov 11, 2021 9:30 pm wrote:

Can I still use it today for learning to code?

You can.

There are lots of other ways to learn programming with (significantly) more active communities, though.

[TheTuringTest]

Thanks everyone! I downloaded Open Turing and everything seems to be working.

I guess I could use another language but this one is unique

So does anyone else know why it's named after Alan Turing?

[SNIPERDUDE]

TheTuringTest @ November 12th 2021, 9:43 am wrote:

So does anyone else know why it's named after Alan Turing?

Not exactly sure, never saw any mention of why online. I do know it is the successor of an earlier project from the two men who made this language called Euclid.

Maybe they wanted to keep in the same theming of names.

Without knowing this Euclid language perhaps this was their first attempt at a Turing Complete language.

Just theories, I know very little about the history of it

[wtd]

I would take a guess that anyone who creates a programming language and especially one for teaching is a bit of an ubernerd, and Ada was already taken.

[scholarlytutor]

According to the original textbook, "Introduction to Programming with Turing", this is the only information I could find:

"Turing (named after Alan M. Turing) was developed by Ric Holt and James Cordy at the University of Toronto in 1984. Like Pascal before it, Turing was designed to suit personal computers, where the instructions are typed in directly. Turing was more powerful than Pascal and was designed to have a mathematically specified syntax (preventing the development of numerous incompatible versions) and that its syntax was much easier to understand."

While this doesn't answer your question, it does point out that there's a tradition of naming programming languages after famous mathematicians, especially the ones who had something to say that was relevant to computing, such as Ada Lovelace and Alan Turing. Even Blaise Pascal developed a type of calculator back in the 17th century, and of course computers were originally invented to do calculations more quickly and accurately than humans.

Hope that helps!

[TheTuringTest]

I saw that too! I downloaded both textbooks off this website and I've started reading it.

That all makes sense, it's probably just a tradition. I've always admired Alan Turing so when I saw that there's a programming language named after him I got really interested.

Well I've already started learning and I'm going to keep at it. I've got 3 books and the big archive that's here. Let's see how it goes

[cordy]

TheTuringTest @ Fri Nov 12, 2021 9:43 am wrote:

Thanks everyone! I downloaded Open Turing and everything seems to be working.

I guess I could use another language but this one is unique

So does anyone else know why it's named after Alan Turing?

The Turing programming language was named after Alan M. Turing at the suggestion of legendary Canadian physicist, computer scientist and educator J.N.Patterson Hume. At the time (early 1980s) it was traditional to name new programming languages after mathematicians, for example, Pascal and Euclid. Pat felt that it made more sense to name a language specifically designed for teaching computer programming after a computer scientist. Prof. Holt and I wrote to the Turing family to ask for their permission to use his name for the new programming language, which at the time was known as "Tiny Perfect Euclid", or TPE, and they granted us that privilege.

Jim Cordy

[scholarlytutor]

Case closed.

[SNIPERDUDE]

Awesome, I now know more about the language that introduced me to coding.

It's also an honor to hear from Cordy himself, cheers man