Turing is a high-level, general-purpose programming language developed in 1982 by Ric Holt and James Cordy, at University of Toronto in Ontario, Canada. It was designed in order to help students taking their first computer science course learn how to code. Turing is a descendant of Pascal, Euclid, and SP/k that features a clean syntax and precise machine-independent semantics. Turing 4.1.0 is the latest stable version of Turing. Turing 4.1.1 and Turing 4.1.2 does not allow stand alone .exe files to be created and versions before Turing 4.1.0 have outdated syntax and outdated functions. Overview Named after British computer scientist Alan Turing, Turing is used primarily as a teaching language at the high school and university level. Two other versions exist, Object-Oriented Turing and Turing Plus, a systems programming variant. In September 2001, "Object Oriented Turing" was renamed "Turing" and the original Turing was renamed "Classic Turing". Turing is no longer supported by Holt Software Associates in Toronto, Ontario. Currently, Microsoft Windows is the only supported platform. Turing is widely used in high schools in Ontario as an introduction to programming. On November 28, 2007, Turing, which was previously a commercial programming language, became freeware, available to download from the developer's website free of charge for personal, commercial, and educational use. The makers of Turing, Holt Software Associates, have since ceased operations, and Turing has seen no further development since November 25, 2007. Syntax Turing is designed to have a very lightweight, readable, intuitive syntax. Here is the entire Hello World! program in Turing with syntax highlighting: put "Hello World!" Turing avoids semicolons and braces, using explicit end markers for most language constructs instead, and allows declarations anywhere. Here is a complete program defining and using the traditional recursive function to calculate a factorial. *comment*% Accepts a number and calculates its factorial function factorial (n: int) : real if n = 0 then result 1 else result n * factorial (n - 1) end if end factorial var n: int loop put "Please input an integer: " .. get n exit when n >= 0 put "Input must be a non-negative integer." end loop put "The factorial of ", n, " is ", factorial (n) Open implementations Currently, there are two open source alternative implementations of Turing: Open Turing, an open source version of the original interpreter, and TPlus, a native compiler for the concurrent systems programming language variant Turing