The user friendly programming language; powerful and easy to use.

‘An incredibly elegant and powerful language, aimed at non-professional programmers’
Guido van Rossum – ABC team member and creator of Python

Everybody knows about designing web sites and computer systems so that they are easy to use, but what would happen if you designed a programming language with the same goals?

The answer is ABC; a language that was designed on a ‘clean sheet’ with the goal of delivering an easy-to-use language ideal for teaching and learning about programming.

ABC is more readable than other languages; no obscure commands. It is more concise than other languages; equivalent programs written in C are five times as long.

It is more powerful than other languages; its perfect choice of high-level data types make it an idea tool for serious programming. ABC was one of the inspirations for the Python programming language and Python shares key ideas and features of ABC.

This book provides a hands-on introduction to the language including many programming examples along with a users guide and a complete definition of the language. The language is available free to run on PCs, Macs and UNIX. (See below).

This book is published by Bosko Books 2005. (ISBN: 0954723945)

Download ABC
You can download these implementations of ABC for free. They are copyrighted (ie. not public domain), but they are free. This means that you may give them to – or get them from – your friends.

PC:
abc-pc.zip (606 kb)
This is a new version with much better memory handling than the previous version. Included are two  .pif  files for running abc on Windows 98 and Windows 2000. Unpack it in  c:\Program Files\ABC  (or read the file  readme.txt).

UNIX:
abc-unix.tar.Z (669 kb)
For Unix (These are sources: also compilable on other machines if you have the right environment, such as Cygwin for the PC).

LINUX:
abc-redhat-linux.tar (440 kb)
Binaries compiled under Redhat 7.3. See the readme for where to put the files.

MAC:
abc-mac.sit.hqx (311 kb)
For the Mac (not tested on newer Macs).