Fw: Re: [seul-edu] language advocacy

[Douglas Loss <dloss@suscom.net>]

On Tue, 12 Jun 2001, owner-seul-edu@seul.org wrote:

> From: William Kendrick <nbs@bolt.sonic.net>
> To: seul-edu@seul.org
> Subject: Re: [seul-edu] language advocacy
> 
> On Tue, Jun 12, 2001 at 10:01:37AM +0800, Thomas Tempé wrote:
> 
> > I have learned Logo and Basic at about the same time (from the 7th grade
> > on), and Logo was such a bore to me... You can't do nothing with it,
> > except moving turtles!
> 
> No... That's just because that's all you _learned_.
> 
> I saw a "Dr. Eliza" program written in Logo for the Commodore 64 in
> a magazine years ago.  I thought "woah, you can _do_ stuff with Logo?"
> Yep!  It's just in the grade-school teachings, all people used it for was
> to help teach _geometry_... not programming.  (Well, not _much_ prog'ing)
> 
> 
> > Now, Basic also has a turtle feature,
> 
> Umm... Which Basic?  There's no real 'standard' for BASIC, so far as I've
> seen.
> 
> My Atari 8-bit has quite a few available, for example, and many are pretty
> incompatible:
> 
>   Atari BASIC
>   BASIC A+
>   TurboBASIC
>   Microsoft BASIC
>   BASIC XL
> 
> :)
> 
> 
> <snip>
> > What I feel is missing from those "simple" languages running on powerful
> > computers, is the ability to take control of the screen.
> > In Basic, you could change the screen color, put the cursor at position
> > (0, 12) and print a blue "O" there. That was fun (hint, hint, geometry
> > teachers: does Logo do cartesian coordinates?)
> 
> If the turtle has a "go to" kind of command, then yes! :^) :^P
> 
> 
> -bill!
> 
-- 
Doug Loss           The art of medicine consists of amusing the
dloss@suscom.net    patient while nature cures the disease.
(570) 326-3987             Voltaire