I have a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, and a Master's degree in Computer Science. Currently I work as a project manager for an electronics firm.
I have programmed rather heavily in Pascal, and 'C' (at least 10K Lines of executable code each, possibly much more, I haven't counted lately) in the MSDOS, Unix, and CP/M environments. I got my start on the Commodore 64 in BASIC in 1983. One of my favorite tools has been Turbo Pascal 3.0, in the MSDOS environment.
I have been looking for a generally available, relatively inexpensive language to use to express software algorithms and designs, and to use to teach the 'next generation' coming after me. I hope that UniComal can fill that niche.
The current generation of Visual Languages in the USA -- Basic, Pascal or C-based tools -- are becoming too expensive, and too complicated to serve very well as teaching tools for computer languages. In the process of adding complexity, I think we are losing the gentle learning curve that existed with the original BASIC and Turbo Pascal implementations.
I never did like the early BASIC 'features' of all global variables, no parameter passing, no named labels, and primitive subroutines. COMAL seemes to have the essential features of local variables, function and procedure calls, and named labels, while keeping the immediate feedback of a tokenized, interpreted language. I hope using UniComal will help restore the 'gentle learning curve'.
I was introduced to COMAL on a Commodore 64 in the 1980's. I liked the language very much, and would like to use it as a teaching language in the future -- perhaps to introduce students to Pascal, since its syntax is very Pascal-like.