Teaching programming through problem solving: The role of the programming language

In this short paper, we advocate the importance of problem solving for teaching “Introduction to Programming”, instead of merely teaching the syntax and semantics of a programming language. We focus on the role of the programming language used for an introductory course. For this purpose we propose CAL, a C-like algorithmic language, which is essentially a well-defined and behaved subset of C with a small number of modest, “educational” extensions.We present the design rationale for CAL, its main features, syntax and illustrative examples.