From the start, Elan was conceived by its designers as a family of (upward compatible) languages:
Of these 5 language levels, the first two have been implemented at the university of Nijmegen, with support from the Ministry of Education (NIVO project). Levels 3 and 4 are still the subject of experimentation. A compiler for Elan-3 is in development.
This manual concerns the Elan-1 Programming Environment. Elan-1 differs from the the full language chiefly in the fact that it does not have the packet mechanism (and consequently no precompilation). It is, however, completely adequate for teaching systematic programming in secondary schools, and in courses for teachers and university students. The simplest industry standard PC, with at least one floppy drive and 256 Kb of memory, is sufficient for its use. For people having even smaller computers (like Apple II, Commodore 64 and Philips 2000), implementations of the smaller Elan-0 Programming Environment are available from
The Elan Programming Environment is a portable environment. On any machine, it will behave as described here, apart from some frills and idiosyncrasies typical for the machine used (such as self-explanatory pull-down menus, etc.). Therefore it allows a high degree of machine independence in producing courseware.
It should be realized that the present version 1.5 is an intermediate product. It is relatively slow, with severe limitations on the available memory. A more complete implementation of Elan is in preparation, including a packet library facility with pre-compilation and a compiler back-end. In the mean time the present version should be sufficient for most teaching purposes - and it will only get better.
Any problems or requests about the Elan Programming Environment can be send to the same address. Note however, that the University of Nijmegen gives no warranty, and does not promise to correct errors reported in this version.