This Introduction to Q’Nial is a quick guide on how to use Nial. It is intended for people with some experience in programming languages such as Pascal, C, Fortran or Turing. Concepts similar to one in those languages are described, but the main focus of the text is to explain the novel aspects of Nial programming. The guide provides suggestions on how to use the features of Q’Nial effectively.

The information is presented in six chapters.

Chapter 1 shows a first session, explains some differences with other languages and shows how to define an operation.

Chapter 2 provides an overview of Nial regarding data objects and introduces operations.

Chapter 3 describes data manipulation by functional objects, operations and transformers. It shows how various rules in Nial are used in the derivation of a result of an expression and explains brackets notation and indexing.

Chapter 4 describes several types of expressions and expression sequences and explains how to define a parameterized operation and a transformer.

Chapter 5 is an extended session showing how to solve a problem from graph theory using Nial.

Chapter 6 provides an overview of the Host System interface and describes some of the mechanisms of the Q’Nial interpreter that are available for direct use.

It is a good idea to experiment with Q’Nial as you read the material in the Introduction to Q’Nial.