[Visit Dick and Pim Klingens website, pandd.demon.nl for more information. It's mostly in Dutch. - Ed]
COMAL was (and still is) my favorite programming language. I started using COMAL in the early 80's. We founded the "Dutch COMAL Users Group" (I was the chairman of the group) and we imported Metanic COMAL from Denmark.
In 10 schools we used COMAL on the RC700 computers of Regnecentralen, mainly for school managing purposes.
In those days we tried to introduce COMAL as THE programming language in the secondary schools in Holland. We did not succeed, because the Dutch ministry of Education thought programming using Logo was the only way.
A few years later we imported COMAL for the Commodore 64 (also from Denmark). At the same time PC's were introduced in education. So we switched to IBM COMAL and later UniCOMAL.
However, teaching programming was out (in Holland)! Only in one university in Holland there was a project in programming with COMAL, as an introduction to programming environments.
In the meantime we maintained contacts with the COMAL Users Group in the USA and some other COMALites (amongst those the COMAL Standardization Group and the groups in Sweden, Denmark and Germany). I published a lot of articles in the American COMAL magazine, COMAL Today. In Holland I published a COMAL news letter, translated some books of Borge Christensen into Dutch and also COMAL manuals.
I still use UniCOMAL version 2.10 in my school (together with a colleague of mine), mainly in management applications (student registration, time table applications). For some other applications I used UniCOMAL version 3.02.
Today I am very occupied (in part time) with a time table program, written in Turbo Pascal. I am mainly busy with the program design, writing the manual and doing some help desk work.
On the downloads page you can find a small program I developed in 1991. It generates Haikus (in English), based on an article by John Krutch (published in his "Experiments in Artificial Intelligence for Small Computers" - Indianapolis, 1981). I used the program in a university course on Formal Grammars.
Edited 19-June-2001