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This is part 4 in a series of articles on obscure programming languages.

Dao is an object-oriented scripting language with dynamically-typed variables.  Dao supports complex data structures with built-in types such as complex numbers and multi-dimensional arrays, and includes their corresponding arithmetic operations.  Dao also supports multi-threaded programming, concurrent and distributed programming with message passing, regular expressions, and macros that allow new syntax to be defined.

The Dao interpreter runs in a lightweight and efficient virtual machine (Dao VM) in the standard C programming language.  Dao also allows direct embedding of C and C++ code into Dao programs through a simple interface.

Limin Fu created Dao in 2006 and has published regular updates.

Why Dao?

Limin create Dao "mainly because I was very frustrated by Perl.  Honestly … if I knew Python or Ruby, I would not have started to create mine."  The key points Limin was trying to address were OOP, C/C++ interface and numeric arrays for scientific computing.  Limin admits that Dao is mostly a "super toy." (source)

"Hello, World" in Dao

stdio.print ( "Hello world!" )

References

• Dao Website
• Dao in Wikipedia
• Daoscript at SourceForge

Article published on August 19, 2008

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