[Tutor] Re: Turtle Graphics thread

[Daniel Yoo]

On Wed, 16 May 2001 alan.gauld@bt.com wrote:

> The digest gor scrambled but Danny was asking about turtle graphics and
> someone said:
> 
> >> >I know that the Python distribution comes with a sample turtle module.
> >> >Can anyone suggest others?  Thanks!
> >>
> >> No, but I'm fascinated by the concept.
> >
> >  Indeed...logo is a language where you are a turtle drawing 
> >lines...it's not that complex - perhaps some of the structures 
> >could be borrowed from that and implemented in python?
> 
> Logo was first with turtle graphics but they are available
> in most languages now. Certainly Turbo Pascal, Smalltalk, 
> C++, Lisp etc all have turtle modules. Python does too but 
> I couldn't get it to work - can't recall what the problem was.

What would be really nice is to have a turtle module as part of the
standard library, or at least have good support for Guido's module.  The
overall feeling that I'm getting is that turtle graphics are nice, but an
afterthought in the Python community.  But if we're going to seriously
consider Python in education (CP4E and all), there probably needs to be a
really good turtle-graphics module to make graphics programming more
appealing.

Gosh, I'm starting to sound like I'm in edu-sig.  Maybe we can write a
turtle module interactively on tutor, and have it beat the heck out of
Guido's module... *grin*


I've found out more about the fractals using turtle graphics, and it seems
really neat.  The idea of "L-systems" from Biology can be used, to control
the turtle to draw really intricate graphics.  As soon as I have time,
I'll see if I can write a simple example to show this.


> Incidentally Logo is a list processing language rather like 
> Lisp but with fewer parentheses. Modern versions have full 
> OO facilities and you can even write windows programs if 
> you really want! Worth a look for the language curious :-)

I know that Brian Harvey's written a series of CS books using Logo as the
primary language.  His series of books are called "Computer Science Logo
Style", and they're really cool stuff.

    http://www-mitpress.mit.edu/book-home.tcl?isbn=0262581515

What surprised me is that Harvey doesn't use Logo's turtle graphics at all
in his presentation of CS concepts, showing that Logo is more than just
turtle graphics --- its list-manipulation features are very impressive.