An Ultra-lightweight Java Interpreter for Bridging CS1

Abstract

This paper presents an ultra-lightweight Java interpreter for use in teaching CS1 courses. The interpreter is targeted specifically at complete beginner programmers and addresses aspects particularly relevant or troublesome to novices, such as expressions, method calls, method calls as sub-expressions, and recursion. The interpreter works on a subset of Java and is intended as a bridge to a more complete environment. Experiences using the interpreter in a semester of CS1 are favourable, and an analysis of its deployment is presented.