A language useful for instructional purposes or as a proof-of-concept for some aspect of computer-science theory, but inadequate for general-purpose programming. bad things can result when a toy language is promoted as a general purpose solution for programming (see bondage-and-discipline language); the classic example is pascal. Several moderately well-known formalisms for conceptual tasks such as programming turing machines also qualify as toy languages in a less negative sense.

See also mftl.

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