teaching programming to beginners

It was thus said that the Great Fred Cisin once stated: Personally, I would use Lua. It's small and nearly consistent [1] and certainly one can write straight forward imperative code in it. But it also supports recursion, lambda functions, closures and does tail call optimizations. In fact, the Y combinator [2] can be written as: function Y(f) local function g(...) return f(g,...) end return g end Also, World of Warcraft and nmap use Lua as a scripting language, so those interested in gaming or network based exploits will learn a useful skill. -spc (It's also very portable, being written in strict C-89 code) [1] There's a bit of a mess with traditional arrays (besides being 1-based) in that: a = { "one" , "two" , "three" } has a length of 3, while b = { "one" , "two" , nil , "four" } is technically undefined. Such arrays can't have a nil value. It's easy to work around and generally, I've never found it to be much of an issue, but it does keep popping up on the Lua mailing list. [2] Those that care will know what this does [3]; those that don't, will probably never need to use this anyway. [3] Allow an anonymous function to call itself.