some notes on the wishlist

[Jan Hlavacek <lahvak@math.ohio-state.edu>]

I just looked at seul-edu lists and I am impressed.  Great work!  I have
some notes on some of the information presented there,  as well as one
item to add.

First the notes:  in the section on multimedia / student programming,
there is a list of logos that could be ported.  This list was probably
lifted from my previous e-mail message,  and it seems that I wasn't very
clear about ucblogo.  In fact,  ucblogo does run on linux.  It runs on
multiple platforms,  including various unices,  macs and windows.  It is
an excellent language,  Brian Harvey did really good job on it.  The
only problem is that it is something completely different from
multimedia rich logos like e.g. microworlds.  It is just logo language
(powerful as it is) with single turtle,  no direct support for things
like animations and sound and so on.  It can't compete with microworlds
and co. simply because it belongs to completely different category of
software.  I propose removing ucblogo from that section and include it
on the available software list.  The url for ucblogo is
ftp://anarres.cs.berkeley.edu/pub/ucblogo/
and documentation is at
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/usermanual

As for another logos mentioned in the paragraph,  here are the links to
them (the ones I could find):
Comenius Logo: http://www.edi.fmph.uniba.sk/logo/
MSWLogo: http://www.softronix.com/
Star Logo: http://el.www.media.mit.edu/groups/el/projects/starlogo/

Now about the proposed wish list addition:

There is another "logo based" language (if it can be called language),
which was recently discussed on comp.lang.logo newsgroup.  It's called
Boxer,  and you can find it at http://soe.berkeley.edu/boxer/ .  It is
some sort of combination of programming language (basically logo) and a
visual development tool.  It can teach children how to program and use
computers creatively,  but at the same time both students and teachers
can easily use it to build useful tools.  In the archives of the boxer
mailing list there is a lot of discussion about boxer and hypercards.
It seems that a lot of functionality of hypercards can be easily
achieved in boxer,  except it is more flexible and much easier to
program.  I also strongly recommend to go to the above web page and go to
the "papers" section and read some of the papers there.  

Unfortunately,  boxer currently exists only for macs.  According to the
web page,  there was an old sunos version,  so there seems to be a
theoretical possibility of linux port (looks like much of boxer is
written in lisp).  I contacted the developers about a unix/linux port,
but so far I didn't get any answer.  I think it would be wonderful to
have boxer on linux.

-- 
Jan Hlav\'{a}\v{c}ek
lahvak@math.ohio-state.edu  (Blind Carbon Copies will bounce)
www: http://www.math.ohio-state.edu/~lahvak/