I told my 2nd year CS students to create a programming language [RESULTS]

This is a very cool experiment, this should be standard practice in teaching CS. I'm a little surprised at the limitations of their interpreters, given the fact that they are 2nd year already - but then again, they were given the task do develop a language for a very specific test case.<p>The absence of support for nested loop/if constructs probably means they didn't write parsers that generate trees, but rather chose to execute scripts line-by-line, right?<p>I'd like to ask you fellow hackers: if you created a toy programming language today, what features would it have?

Ok, I'll be the slow witted one in the room - When creating your own language, what did you write it in? If you're using Java or C, are you still using it's compiler but coming up with your own syntax? I'm a little confused how it worked.

There exists tons of "toy" language implementation available online. I wonder why no students came up with a forth or lisp like solution that would have been able to handle nested loops, ifs, etc...<p>When I was in my 2nd year as a CS student, one of the assignment was to reimplement the Unix's M4 preprocessor (a superset of C's preprocessor), based on its manual... It includes an expression evaluator, we were told that tools like lex and yacc would help...<p>Well... that was 25 years ago.

"I think it happened because they wrote just C code until now (they will meet PHP next semester)."<p>This surprises me. Of the higher-level languages you (or your school) could choose, why PHP? I understand for beginners, but why for students coming from a C background?