This website aims to collect the documentation about Grace and its libraries. This is the Help page; you can reach it at any time by clicking the house icon, or the words Grace Documentation, in the the blue navigation bar at the top of every page, and then clicking on Help in the left sidebar.

The Top Navigation Bar

The other items in the blue navigation bar (found at the top of every page) give access to several different kinds of information.

  • Tutorial: a set of pages that are intended to help beginning programmers. They aim to be like an online textbook that contains live examples. These pages are a work-in-progress. The tutorial also describes how to use Grace’s web-based program editor.

  • Specification: the specification of the Grace programming language. This is a document that describes the whole language as presently defined. Much of it will not be accessible to novices; it’s intended for instructors, language implementors, and programming-language researchers.

  • Modules: this pull-down menu lists a growing collection of external modules that are available to the Grace programmer. Modules make available features that are useful to Grace programmers but that are not part of the base language.

  • Dialects: this pull-down menu lists available Grace dialects. Dialects are special modules that extend or restrict the Grace language for specific purposes. In particular, some of Grace’s dialects are designed to support specific teaching objectives. The Dialects menu also gives access to a page that describes how instructors can write their own dialects. One of the most important dialects is standard, the dialect in which you are writing if you specify no other. The documentation for standard describes the methods available on the standard String, Number, and Collection objects.

The top navigation bar also provides a keyword search function. This searches the page summaries and keywords of each page on this site. (It is not a full-text search, such as is provided by Google.)

The Side Navigation Menu

Within each section of the website, the left sidebar provides additional navigation. On this page, it gives quick access to materials that can also be found using the top navigation bar. Within each section, it provides local navigation; for example within the Tutorial, it lists the tutorial topics.