A Functional Analysis of Courseware Authoring Languages

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Abstract
An opening discussion of the rationale for sharing courseware between educators in terms of minimizing costs and maintaining quality is followed by a description of how sharing is accomplished and how hardware and software incompatibilities can impede the process. The author then introduces a system for circumventing the problems. This system, called a multilingual-interpreter system, allows a number of different authoring languages to be implemented on different machines while minimizing the work required to accomplish the task. By taking advantage of the large number of common properties (overlap) that exists between authoring languages, a reduction in time and effort is realized. In order to determine the extent of this overlap, an analysis was performed on five representative authoring languages: BASIC, CAN-7, COURSEWRITER, TUTOR, and NATAL The results of the analysis revealed that, when the syntactic portion of each language is ignored, a significant degree of functional overlap exists between the languages. The author discusses the ramifications of this finding in terms of authoring language implementation and courseware sharing.

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