ABC is an imperative general-purpose programming language

Programming language

A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....

 and programming environment

Integrated development environment

An integrated development environment is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development...

 developed at CWI, Netherlands

Netherlands

The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...

 by Leo Geurts, Lambert Meertens

Lambert Meertens

Lambert Guillaume Louis Théodore Meertens is a Dutch computer scientist and professor.While still a student at the Ignatius Gymnasium in Amsterdam, Meertens designed a computer, together with his classmate Kees Koster....

, and Steven Pemberton

Steven Pemberton

Steven Pemberton is one of the developers of the ABC programming language and of the Views system.He is chair of the W3C XHTML2 and XForms Working Groups and also member of RDFa Taskforce....

. It is interactive, structured, high-level, and intended to be used instead of BASIC, Pascal, or AWK. It is not meant to be a systems-programming language but is intended for teaching or prototyping.

ABC has only five basic datatypes. It does not require variable declarations. It has explicit support for top-down programming.