In Dijkstra's book "A Discipline of Computer Programming" an anonymous computer language is described. Egg is an interpreter for this language, written in Java using the SableCC package. The name Egg has no significance!

Since choosing that name I have found this entry in the language list:

Dijkstra's guarded command language - Edsger Dijkstra, ca. 1974.

Introduced the concept of guards and committed choice [= don't care] nondeterminism. Described and used (but never named) in A Discipline of Programming, E. Dijkstra, P-H 1976. Dijkstra later (1972) referred to this language as DOVPA (Dijkstra's Own Version of Pidgin Algol).

The following information is available:

• Download Egg and associated files as tarball (unix) or zipped archive. Some browsers may try and display the tarball rather than saving it to disk - if so, use "save link as a file", or similar, from your browser menus or right mouse button (sorry - I am trying to get the server here re-configured).
• How to install Egg.
• Comments on the design and implementation. This includes a brief explanation of why Egg was written and some comments on the use of SableCC, problems with the current implementation, and future work.
• The language. A summary of the available commands.
• A post from the sablecc-list discussing the early design of Egg.

Copyright and Licence

Egg uses the ca.mcgill.sablecc.util package which is distributed under the Gnu LGPL and copyright (c) 1997, 1998 Etienne Gagnon. This package is included in the archive available for download.

All the remaining code is copyright (c) 1998 Andrew Cooke and licensed according to the Gnu GPL (see here for more details).

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