A language useful for instructional purposes or as a proof-of-concept for some aspect of computer-science theory, but inadequate for general-purpose programming. Bad Things can result when a toy language is promoted as a general purpose solution for programming (see {bondage-and-discipline language}) the classic example is {Pascal}. Several moderately well-known formalisms for conceptual tasks such as programming Turing Machines also qualify as toy languages in a less negative sense. See also MFTL. [Jargon File] (1995-05-09)
