NATAL(ID:5584/nat001)

System-independant authentic language


References:
  • Westrom, M. "Summary and current status of NATAL-74" AEDS Journal 10, 4 (Fall 1977), 83-89. view details
  • Schreiner, A. T. review of Westrom 1977 view details Abstract: The paper, published in two parts, describes the features of NATAL-74, a CAI programming language "commissioned by the National Research Council in 1972 and designed by the IBM Canada Lab to meet specifications produced by a panel of CAI users from across Canada." There seem to be three upward-compatible levels of the language (which the article does not distinguish), and a full implementation is said to be available on a PDP-10 at NRC in Ottawa.

    The paper provides a reasonably well-arranged list of features of NATAL-74. Some of these seem rather cumbersome to use (e.g., the display sublanguage with its one letter commands), others are reminiscent of PL/I (e.g., the condition blocks raised during student input, etc.) and may be quite elegant. NATAL-74 seems to be a powerful language with structuring facilities permitting a clean division of programming effort between experienced authors and programming specialists. The paper provides neither a coding example nor clear syntactic descriptions of important statements (e.g., the response statement). It also suffers from poor structuring, and therefore requires a reading effort which does not seem to be proportional to the resulting understanding of the advantages of the language.
    External link: Online copy
          in ACM Computing Reviews 19(03) March 1978 view details
  • Kearsley, Greg "Authoring systems in computer based education" view details Extract: Description
    NATAL (NATional Author Language) is a system independent author language developed in Canada and is also implemented on a variety of machines including the DEC 10, Honeywell Series 60, and IBM/370.

          in [ACM] CACM 25(07) July 1982 view details
  • David Godfrey and Jack Brahan "Computer-aided learning using the NATAL language" A Softwords book view details
          in [ACM] CACM 25(07) July 1982 view details