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Originally Posted by Marvin
Have you seen Befunge syntax and layout?
You would not think Pascal or BASIC were far harder to do if you had.
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I looked it up on Wikipedia, and Befunge's syntax is exactly the reason why I think that gryfang's choice of language is remarkably wise.
Stop thinking about the language from a user's perspective. Think about how easy it is for a computer to interpret. All of the commands in Befunge are denoted by single characters, so the look-ahead is exactly one character. Hell, you don't even need a parser generator for that, a case statement would do!
The only potential point of difficulty in Befunge is that it's a two dimensional language, but this isn't much of a sticking point.
A Pascal or BASIC interpreter would be
at the very least twenty times the size. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if it were a hundredfold larger, as you have to deal with all sorts of scoping and memory management crap. Befunge doesn't have any of those problems.
Conventional languages, with the possible exception of Lisp, usually have very involved and complex syntaxes. I would certainly
not recommend using such languages as a starting point.