[Year 12 Its] approved languages for IT Software Development

[Tony Forster]

I note: "Specific distributions, projects or variations of languages may be 
suitable as long as they are able to address the criteria listed above ... 
the VCAA recommends teacher firstly consider a language from the approved 
list"

GameMaker fills all the criteria, (including data structures such as stacks, 
queues, lists, maps, priority queues and grids) see 
http://www.freewebs.com/schoolgamemaker/#samples for examples of databases, 
file storage, GUI's and data validation
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VCE Software Development (currently Information Systems)
Approved programming languages for the reaccredited study in 2007
Students will use one programming language from the accompanying list, to 
develop purpose-designed software.
In the development of this software, students should be able to:

. develop a graphical user interface (GUI), for use in portable computing 
devices, such as laptops, personal digital
assistants, gaming consoles, mobile phones
. construct and use data structures, for example arrays, strings, sets, 
lists, tables, records and stacks
. design, construct and use files to store and retrieve data
. design and apply data-validation techniques
. use program control structures: selection, iteration and sequencing.

The purpose-designed software will entail the use of objects, methods and 
their properties, and event-driven
programming.

List of approved languages
Delphi
VisualBasic (not Visual Basic for Applications)/REALbasic
VisualBasic.NET
Visual C++
Visual C#
Visual Fox Pro
Pascal (object-oriented variations only)
Visual J, Visual J#, Java
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Additional languages can be used to embellish a product, for example 
Javascript with webpages. However, these would
be supplementary to the main language and not replace it.
Specifi c distributions, projects or variations of languages may be suitable 
as long as they are able to address the criteria
listed above, including, but not limited to, an object-oriented programming 
capability with graphical user interface features
and fi le handling. Since it is impractical to itemise each of these 
language variations, the VCAA recommends teacher firstly
consider a language from the approved list.