Lesson plan

WSFN (programming language)

WSFN (Which Stands for Nothing) is an interpreted programming language for controlling robots created by Li-Chen Wang. It was designed to be as small as possible, a "tiny" language, similar to Wang's earlier effort, Palo Alto Tiny BASIC. WSFN was first published in Dr. Dobb's Journal in September 1977. The language consists primarily of single-letter commands to tell a robot to move in certain directions, while other commands perform tests or basic mathematical operations. These can be grouped into named macros to produce more complex programs. The original version also included code that simulated the robot as a cursor on the VDM-1 display, or graphically on a Cromemco Dazzler display. This is similar to the turtle graphics added to the Logo programming language in 1969. Extended WSFN is an implementation created for the Atari 8-bit computers written by Harry Stewart and published by the Atari Program Exchange in 1981. In addition to supporting turtle graphics, it adds a number of commands to control the graphics and sound capabilities of that platform. It was offered as an "educational graphics language for beginning programmers".

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Article summary

WSFN (Which Stands for Nothing) is an interpreted programming language for controlling robots created by Li-Chen Wang. It was designed to be as small as possible, a "tiny" language, similar to Wang's earlier effort, Palo Alto Tiny BASIC. WSFN was first published in Dr. Dobb's Journal in September 1977. The language consists primarily of single-letter commands to tell a robot to move in certain directions, while other commands perform tests or basic mathematical operations. These can be grouped into named macros to produce more complex programs. The original version also included code that simulated the robot as a cursor on the VDM-1 display, or graphically on a Cromemco Dazzler display. This is similar to the turtle graphics added to the Logo programming language in 1969. Extended WSFN is an implementation created for the Atari 8-bit computers written by Harry Stewart and published by the Atari Program Exchange in 1981. In addition to supporting turtle graphics, it adds a number of commands to control the graphics and sound capabilities of that platform. It was offered as an "educational graphics language for beginning programmers".

Key claims

  1. publication date: 1981 — source: Wikipedia · confidence 0.95

Discussion questions

  1. Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
  2. The record states that the publication date is "1981". What evidence would count against this claim?
  3. Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
  4. If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?

Bibliography

  1. Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1354162653

Key claims and bibliography are generated from the same tracked claims and sources as the article page.