Using an Imperative Language to Teach Applicative Methods

Many universities teach traditional, imperative languages in their introductory programming courses, even though an applicative language may be preferable. In this paper, we present a compromise and show how applicative programming methods may be illustrated eeectively using a subset of Pascal. The approach focuses on order of evaluation, the if statement, functions, and recursion. We discuss several program examples actually given in class, and interesting problems encountered by students who had previous imperative programming experience. Although we are just beginning to investigate the results of our approach, we believe that we have been able to cut the time to explain Pascal syntax to a minimum, allowing more coverage of programming techniques.