This is the user manual for version 1.5 of the Elan Programming Environment developed at the university of Nijmegen in the Netherlands, which is currently available on various UNIX machines, MS-DOS machines, Apple Macintosh, Atari and Amiga. It is distributed without warranty, for use in teaching. It offers a nearly complete version of the educational language Elan in the form of the Elan Programming Environment.
This manual gives a short description for the user of the Elan Programming Environment. It assumes the reader to have a good knowledge of programming in algorithmic languages.
This manual can not teach you how to program. For an English textbook on systematic programming with Elan we suggest:
which is marketed in the USA by Wiley, and can be ordered in the UK from
The present manual starts with an example session, introducing the reader in a hands-on fashion to the use of the Elan Programming Environment. Then follows a brief introduction to Elan-0, the subset of Elan which is intended for introductory programming, followed by some examples. The second part of this manual starts with an overview of the full Elan language, in the form of annotated syntax diagrams. Then follows a description of the the user interface of the programming environment and some more ambitious examples. In an appendix an overview of the available library is given.