ANNOUNCING! V A L G O L From its modest beginnings in Southern California's San Fernando Valley - a long recognized hotbed of intellectual creativity - comes the latest of modern programming languages - VALGOL. VALGOL is en- joying a dramatic surge of popularity across the industry, for good reason. User-friendly command structure and syntax abound. VALGOL commands include the powerful: REALLY, LIKE, WELL, and YOUKNOW. VALGOL variables are assigned values using the intuitively appealing operators =LIKE, and, =TOTALLY. Special "Californian Booleans", FERSURE and NOWAY, make VALGOL a joy to read. Structuremingorthe andHEMcts A tantalizing sample of VALGOL illustrates the significant advance this language offers over such traditional fare as FORTRAN and COBOL. LIKE YOUKNOW (I_MEAN) START if PIZZA =LIKE BITCHEN and B =LIKE TUBULAR and C =LIKE GRODY then FOR I =LIKE 1 to OH MAYBE 100 DO WAH + DITTY to TOTHEMAX BARF(I) =TOTALLY GROSS(OUT) SURE LIKE BAG THIS PROBLEM REALLY LIKE TOTALLY YOUKNOW. Sadly, one VALGOL shortcoming is its somewhat unfriendly reporting of syntax errors. Reminiscent of C and early assembly language compilers, errors are reported but must be tracked down by the programmer. For example, the above program will cause the VALGOL interpreter to generate: GAG ME WITH A SPOON A cursory examination of the code quickly reveals our obvious error - the commands LIKE and BAG are incorrectly paired. LIKE may only be used in con-junction with REALLY (or TOTALLY as in the last line, of course, only if followed by the qualifier YOUKNOW). We have been assured that the final release version of VALGOL will incorporate a more helpful error reporting system. With this shortcoming bagged we can imagine serious APL and FORTRAN programmers will soon find their existing languages less challenging and certainly less easily read and understood.