FOIL (programming language)

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FOIL was the name for two different programming languages.

Contents

CAI style language

The first FOIL was a CAI language developed at the University of Michigan in 1967. [1] The acronym stood for File-Oriented Interpretive Language and it was very similar to other CAI languages like COURSEWRITER and PILOT. However, it tried to make the language somewhat block-structured using whitespace which ended up making the language vaguely similar to BASIC or ABC.

Example

 :START COUNT=0  TY Enter the number of times you want to repeat the statement:  ACCEPT  MAX=NUMBER.(1)  :LOOP  TY This loop has run #COUNT times it will terminate when it runs #MAX times  IF COUNT<MAX,     COUNT=COUNT+1     GO TO :LOOP  TY Do you want to do this again?  ACCEPT  IF 'yes', GO TO START  IF 'no' GO TO FINISH  :FINISH  TY Goodbye!  STOP 

References

  1. Land, E. de (2013-11-11). Information Technology in Health Science Education. Springer Science & Business Media. p. 517. ISBN   978-1-4684-2460-7 . Retrieved 2025-07-22.

Music generation language

The second FOIL was a music generation language for the Touché computer instrument in 1979. The Touché was a keyboard that had digital tone generation and allowed you to program software for performances. The acronym stood for Far Out Instrument Language and was succeeded by MetaFOIL and FOIL-83. The language was developed by David Rosenboom and was based on Forth.