Why I recommend "Pilot: The Language and How to Use It Including Apple Pilot and Superpilot"

Pilot: The Language and How to Use It Including Apple Pilot and Superpilot

by Thomas Conlon

This is the only book I know of on the PILOT programming language.

PILOT – The Language And How to Use It including Apple PILOT and SuperPILOT is a pretty good book.

This book is almost exactly the size of the original book on Pascal programming by Nicklaus Wirth, the Pascal User Manual & Report.

This book thoroughly covers the much simpler – and far less powerful – PILOT language.

PILOT had its heyday, if you can call it that, back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was well-suited to writing programs that did CAI (Computer Aided Instruction).

These days, what was known as CAI is called CBT (Computer Based Training). CBT applications are implemented with GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces) as is pretty much all consumer software nowadays.

PILOT applications were marked by being predominantly text-based output, keyboard input to answer questions, some very basic logic/math capabilities, and very simple pattern-matching capabilities.

The language had no database facilities or GUIs. Those really did not come into consumer computing until after PILOT’s time.

PILOT did not even have facilities for file input/output! Apple’s implementation, called Apple PILOT, did support using data files.

Apple also had the ability to draw graphics. Just what was called “high resolution” graphics at the time. It only ran on an Apple II computer, so they were not really all that high resolution.

This book covers all these versions.

There are many examples in this book, tables describing its syntax/grammar, some illustrations, and even quaint little Apple II screenshots of running PILOT programs.

There is a table of contents well as a good index.

If you need to understand PILOT programs out there somewhere, or you just want to learn the language – then I do recommend this book. However, I think the language itself is quite dated and lacks support for any of the modern things we take for granted in computer software today.

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