I had seen your (apparently old) project on github, and thought it was interesting. I played around with it a bit, and though I never learned Logo back in the day, I was aware of it.
I’d be interested in checking out your updated version.
One thing I wasn’t totally clear on with the github version was the “proper” version of Logo syntax to use with it. I poked around and did some research when I looked at it, and from what I could tell there were lots of different variations of Logo that had different commands and syntax. They all had the same kind of programming model and the idea of moving the pen/turtle and same basic functions, but the details didn’t always line up.
It seems like a good fit for the PicoCalc though, especially if you want to get children interested in programming. It’s also kind of an interesting language anyway, since there seem to be quite a few iterative patterns and drawings that can be done using it. Some of the MMBasic enthusiasts over at TheBackShed implemented an ad hoc Logo interpreter and ported some examples over to it. Might be a good exercise as part of testing your Logo project to port these examples back to Logo.
Logo is very similar to BASIC when asking about the “proper” version of syntax. The difference lies in the naming and availability of the primitives that are implemented.
Logo does have an image problem since most equate turtle graphics with Logo. One can implement turtle graphics in any language and I believe MMBasic has it. Logo itself is a very rich language that can be used to solve an endless list of problems and in cases, more efficiently than BASIC.
Logo has its roots in Lisp and Scheme. There are two main dialects of Logo: MIT and LCSI. MIT is where Logo was developed originally and then that creator spun off his own company, LCSI, to develop the language commercially. Most Logo implementations can be traced back to these two dialects.
In addition to small differences between those two dialects, most implementation are written to fit the capabilities of the hardware they run on, similar to BASIC. Some computers of the day had sprites, others did not. Every computer did sound differently. They had different file systems with different functionality. As in BASIC, you see these differences in the language. No one would expect that typing in a moderately complex Commodore BASIC program in MMBasic would run without error, for instance.
I’d certainly be interested! Like my experience with basic, my experience with logo is at least 20 years in the past. Do you have a link to a firmware I can download?
