1 Introduction

This manual is a tutorial on the Mjølner System. The tutorial gives an introduction to the Mjølner System environment to someone who already knows how to program in another (object-oriented) language and want to know how to do it in BETA.

Often a hidden strength of a language lies in the available libraries and the ease with which it can interact with the operating system or other software.

We present a sequence of tutorial programs designed to teach the essentials of BETA programming. The programs start with trivial objectives like printing out 'Hello world' and doing arithmetic and gradually cover things like input/output, files, arrays, procedures, objects, containers, GUI, and persistence.

How to install the Mjølner System, call the compiler, etc., will not be described in this tutorial. This information can be found the system manuals [MIA 90-2].

Most of the tutorial programs developed in this tutorial, are supplied along with the Mjølner System in the tutorial demo directory.

Although it is not necessary, it will be an advantage for the reader to be familiar with the basic concepts of the BETA language. The BETA Language Introduction [MIA 94-26] gives an introduction to the BETA language. The BETA Book [MMN 93] is the main reference for the BETA language and every programmer with intend to use BETA extensively should read this book.

1.1 Acknowledgment

This tutorial is based on a set of tutorial notes written by Jean Vaucher, Professeur d'informatique, Universite de Montreal, on sabbatical at CRIM, November 1993. Mjølner Informatics are grateful to Jean Vaucher for taking the initiative in writing the first BETA tutorial notes. By permission of Jean Vaucher, we have adopted these notes for this tutorial and extended them with more sections containing examples on repetitions, texts, containers, persistence, and GUI programming.