SetlX — A Tutorial Version 2.2.0 Karl Stroetmann Duale Hochschule Baden-W¨urttemberg Stuttgart
[email protected] Tom Herrmann Duale Hochschule Baden-W¨urttemberg Stuttgart
[email protected] August 13, 2013 Abstract In the late sixties, Jack Schwartz, a renowned professor of mathematics at the Courant Institute for Mathematical Sciences in New York, developed a very high level programming language called Setl [Sch70, SDSD86]. The most distinguishing feature of this language is the support it offers for sets and lists. This feature permits convenient implementations of mathematical algorithms: As set theory is the language of mathematics, many mathematical algorithms that are formulated in terms of set theory have very straightforward implementations in Setl. Unfortunately, at the time of its invention, Setl did not get the attention that it deserved. One of the main reasons was that Setl is an interpreted language and in those days, the run time overhead of an interpreter loop was not yet affordable. More than forty years after the first conception of Setl, the efficiency of computers has changed dramatically and for many applications, the run time efficiency of a languange is no longer as important as it once was. After all, modern scripting languages like Python [vR95] or Ruby [FM08] are all interpreted and noticeably slower than compiled languages like C, but this fact hasn’t impeded their success. At the Baden-W¨urttemberg Corporate State University, the first author has used Setl2 [Sny90] for several years in a number of introductory computer science courses. He has noticed that the adoption of Setl has made the abstract concepts of set theory tangible to the students.