Ruby and Logo?

[Brian Candler]

Anybody remember Logo, a teaching language from the 80's? Its big plus was
that you could use it to drive a 'turtle' around the floor and draw shapes.

ISTM that Ruby would be an ideal environment for this - either using a
graphical display plus an irb-like shell at the bottom of the screen, or
indeed controlling a real robot turtle.

fred = Turtle.new
fred.pendown
3.times { fred.forward 50; fred.turn 120 }

And of course,

fred = nil
GC.start

would make fred disappear into thin air :-)

But unlike Logo, this would be an introduction to a "real" programming
language. Does anything like this exist already for Ruby?

Cheers,

Brian.

[gabriele renzi]

Brian Candler ha scritto:

>
> But unlike Logo, this would be an introduction to a "real" programming
> language. Does anything like this exist already for Ruby?

at least I can tell you this has been discussed some times in the past,
and on RAA there is
http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/ruby_turtles/

wich IIRC was quite functional.

Oh, and BTW, I may be wrong but it seem to me LOGO was just a strange
dialect of lisp, and thus maybe a real language by itself :)

[James Edward Gray II]

On Apr 14, 2005, at 10:21 AM, Brian Candler wrote:

> Anybody remember Logo, a teaching language from the 80's? Its big plus
> was
> that you could use it to drive a 'turtle' around the floor and draw
> shapes.

I've actually done a little playing with this idea for a future Ruby
Quiz. I've written some code and played around, but just haven't
stumbled across the perfect quiz angle yet. I know it's in there
though!

James Edward Gray II

[mer...@gmail.com]

I was playing around with netlogo: http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/

I was impress by its power and simplicity. It is written in Java. So it
might be possible to call its API throught jruby.

This can be a very good way to introduce programming to kids.

[Glenn Parker]

gabriele renzi wrote:
> Oh, and BTW, I may be wrong but it seem to me LOGO was just a strange
> dialect of lisp, and thus maybe a real language by itself :)

Yup, Logo is a bastard child of mama Lisp, and it gets all the respect
and support you might expect.

--
Glenn Parker | glenn.parker-AT-comcast.net | <http://www.tetrafoil.com/>