My language of choice for this topic is Euphoria, a BASIC-like language that has some very likeable properties. For one, it is dynamically typed, which is good for a beginner. The syntax is very clean and easy to read. Also, it has an extremely flexible (though easy-to-use) dynamic array, which is called a sequence. It seems very natural to use. And it's rather low-level, since a string, for example, is represented as a sequence of chars (which in turn are just ascii codes and thus numbers). So, to get a part of a string, instead of using cumbersome functions like
left() or mid() as in BASIC, one can just write:
a_string = "Hello World!" -- same as {'H','e','l','l','o',' ','W','o','r','l','d','!'}
? a_string[7..11] -- yields "World"I think Euphoria is a really nice language, and definitely worth looking at. It's also interpreted and it features comprehensive error messages as well as a comfortable single-stepping feature that is invokable through code. There are lots of third-party libraries that extend the language (such as a Win32 library that allows one to write windows apps, an OpenGL library, an SDL library, and so on).
Have fun with this nice little language!
