But do you want to teach programming with a "toy language" with so many flaws? A toy language to teach the basics (no pun intended) of loops and decisions would be Seymour Papparts turtle graphics language "Logo". As for hiding the machine. My claim was just the opposite. C doesn't make a great effort to hide the machine so if that is the objective, as was argued by Casandro, than C would be the only choice, apart from some sort of (macro-) assembler. But indeed not a very likely choice for computer literacy. No, I'm afraid BASIC, and Visual Basic for that matter was and is imo a language that teaches bad programming practices and should therefore be avoided.

From an educational point of view BASIC is among the worst choices you can make. For one it doesn't do any strong type checking and introduces a "lazy" programming skills. Pascal we conceived with teaching programming in mind. And it still holds the position in both power and learnabilety. Besideds it tranfers excellent to other high level langauges. PHP might be a good choice as well as it is the de facto standard in web programming. Being interpreted it also allows very well for exploitative learning. C++ is a bad choice, as is Java. It would advocate C3 as well. Hiding the machine I personally don't see as a problem. No single person these days has a complete view of "how-computers-actually-work". Those days are gone. But if you insist than only the C-programming language would adequately convey that knowledge. Kernigan and Ritchi still offer the best way to learn, imho. I totally agree with the last comment. We seem to forget that children and youngsters are very capable of construction and quick learners.