The POSTSCRIPT[1,2] graphics programming language was devised by Adobe Systems as a device-independent language for communicating with laser printers and other high-resolution graphical output devices. It was intended mainly as a standard intermediate form to be generated by other programs such as word processors and desktop publishing systems. POSTSCRIPT was therefore designed with a very simple, postfix syntax that is easy for programs to generate and parse, but not so easy for people to write and read. POSTSCRIPT has since been adopted by Sun Microsystems as the basis of their NeWS[3] window server. The programmability of the NeWS server encourages the application programmer to write significant amounts of POSTSCRIPT code for downloading into the server. While doing this, the difficulties of writing large POSTSCRIPT programs by hand become apparent. This document introduces the basic features of POSTSCRIPT, discusses some of its shortcomings as a programming language for people, and describes a new language, P, which the author has devised to overcome some of these shortcomings.