toy language

A toy language is a term for a computer programming language that it not considered to fulfill the robustness or completeness requirement of a computer language. As such it is not considered a suitable language for creating solid and reliable programs for use in production environments.Usually such a language is limited in one or several ways. By this, it is meant that one of its major limitations is its number of programming constructs or concepts supported. The language can still be complete in the eyes of the creator or its community of users. The grade of completeness in this context is related to real life use, as opposed to its mathematical completeness. Another typical limitation of toy languages is that they do not necessarily have a set of support libraries/functions/utilities that are considered a requirement for creating production quality programs.
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<language> A language useful for instructional purposes or as a proof-of-concept for some aspect of computer-science theory, but inadequate for general-purpose programming. Bad Things can result when a toy language is promoted as a general purpose solution for programming (see bondage-and-discipline language); the classic example is Pascal. Several moderately well-known formalisms for conceptual tasks such as programming Turing Machines also qualify as toy languages in a less negative sense.
See also MFTL.
[Jargon File]
(1995-05-09)