dubois@uwmacc.UUCP (Paul DuBois) (09/18/85)
A while back, I asked about any experience people had with Logo. Here's what I got in reply. My thanks to all who responded, and I hope it is useful to others as well. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: uwvax!ihnp4!gargoyle!stuart (Stuart A. Kurtz) Organization: Dept. of Comp. Sci., The University of Chicago I have the Microsoft Logo, but not the Expertelligence. I really like the Microsoft Logo -- it has an acceptable debugger, and some limited Mac Toolbox support. We're giving it some though as an introductory programming language for our "poets" course. It seems reasonably fast, and my wife (who has used Logo extensively on the Apple II's to teach geometry to elementary school students) thinks its a solid implementation too. You should know that this is not a Microsoft product in the usual sense -- it was developed by a Canadian software house and Microsoft is just handling the marketing. It is *not* copy-protected. It has a customization program which enables you to allocate various amounts of space to different types of objects. Presumably, if you had a Mega-Mac, you could access the whole thing... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [I sent back a question to Stuart; this was the reply:] From: uwvax!ihnp4!gargoyle!stuart (Stuart A. Kurtz) > Expertelligence Logo has the ability to draw things simultaneously in > multiple windows. Does MS Logo do that? It depends on what you mean. MS Logo can open lots of "graphics" windows simultaneously, and can rapidly switch between them -- in essence, maintaining multiple independent graphics environments. Like MacPascal, it does not retain an off-screen bit-image of each window, so if you reveal a portion of a window that was obsured (say, by another window), it is white. I consider this to be a bug, or perhaps an incomplete implementation of what should really occur. My current best assessment: It is a good, solid implementation of Logo that should be very useful for teaching programming concepts to younger students, while remaining sufficiently powerful (and *almost* fast enough) for fairly advanced programming. >From an advanced point of view, it is a simple Lisp, with fexprs but not lexprs or macros. (Although the fact that list arguments are implicitly quoted enables you to write Logo procedures which implement various control structures -- which is probably the most important use of macros in Lisp.) I've found it to be **vastly** superior to MacPSL (Portable Standard Lisp, Utah) as a lisp programming environment. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From uwvax!ihnp4!ucla-cs!seth Mon Aug 12 01:23:57 1985 Organization: UCLA Computer Science Dept. I haven't seen MS Logo but I own ExperLogo. The claims for ExperLogo are true (i.e. compiled, fast, lots of features) but it is different from Apple Logo or Krell (Terapin) Logo for the Apple IIs. In trying to make it a suitable language for 'REAL' programming, they've gotten away from some of the simplicity which makes it suitable for children. In order for a child to use it, they must be able to manipulate the Mac interface which is no mean feat for a 4 year-old or younger. I'm sure plenty of 5-6 year olds would also have difficulty. I think it might be confusing for a child to deal with the two different windows. Instead of providing a splitscreen, ExperLogo pops up a graphics window for drawing and the interaction takes place in the Listener window. This is fine but in order to edit things, you must go into an edit buffer which is yet another window which will obscure what is already on the screen. Basically I think it is a good product and could be used by children with supervision. I may be misjudging the complexity but being the uncle of a precocious (obviously a biased opinion) 4 year-old and having watched her play with my Mac I remain cynical. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: uwvax!seismo!allegra!alice!dsj (David S. Johnson, AT&T Bell Laboratories) I've had microsoft logo for about two months. My wife tells me that it's considerably faster than Terrapin Logo on the Apple II (but not so fast that you can't see the turtle move very well, a complaint I saw on the net some months ago about Experlogo). It profits greatly from a 512 Mac, but will apparently run on a 128. It has a nice "Mac-ish" interface, in addition to some advanced features that take advantage of the mac quickdraw routines. It can do graphics on the sphere. We liked it very much. Two drawbacks, however. One: covering up the graphics window erases the contents, even if by desk accessory (this is not a bug, as it is mentioned in the manual, but it is a painful obstacle, given that the Mac screen is small already, and you need a text window to invoke programs. Two: You cannot load a file directly into an editor window, as you would normally want to do when modifying a program. This IS a bug (microsoft has been informed and wrote back a nice letter saying they would try to fix it), but can be circumvented by loading to the text window and then doing a cut and paste (there is a "select all" on the menu, which speeds the process). ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- | Paul DuBois {allegra,ihnp4,seismo}!uwvax!uwmacc!dubois --+-- | "A mind like cement: thoroughly mixed and permanently set" |