Origins

Told by Will Pittenger, the creator of ASIL and founder of this project.

The first programming language that I learned was AppleSoft. It served as inspiration for ASIL. Back in 1990, I was attending Western Illinois University. The main language they used back then for instruction was Pascal. I did like how readily Pascal caught errors that a beginning programmer might make. But I felt BASIC was a better language in other aspects. Namely, the syntax seemed cleaner and easier to read. Less redundant too.

By 1991, I was starting to combine them. I had also taken short courses on C and C++ and could use them too. Later that year, the name ASIL was born. One early feature was that all the features of AppleSoft (except line numbers and IF/THEN) were defined using other ASIL features. Even commands like FOR and PRINT where written as sample ASIL code. To accomplish that, I created [Commands] and [Complex Statements]. I also made use of custom keywords you could include in the syntax of any procedure.

Unfortunately, the syntax flexibility was too much for the parsers of the time. So by 1994, ASIL was effectively on hold. However, I’m hoping today’s parsing technology can keep up.