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steve donovan wrote:
[...]
I remember BBC BASIC too, on the Archimedes. Fun machines.

I've still got one! Er, anyone want a very battered RISC PC?

LOGO was cool, ahead of its time, especially with Seymour Papert's
idea of 'a dignified mathematics for children'.

I suspect that being ahead of its time is what killed it --- it was fundamentally too heavyweight for the day's 8-bit micros. LOGO on the BBC was painful. Acornsoft LOGO came with some extremely cool demos, including a Prolog-light written in LOGO that I was way too young to appreciate at the time, but it took about five minutes to run!

So I think it got a reputation for being a toy suitable for fiddling around with turtles but not capable of anything more, which is a shame, as it's vastly more powerful than that. (It has list management primitives copied intact from LISP, which pretty much invented list processing. And, like LISP, code and data are interchangeable, which gave it really good introspection abilities.)

It would not BTW be too difficult to do a Turtle Graphics environment for Lua.

I'm actually wondering whether it would be possible to do a LOGO pseudo-JIT in Lua, which converted code into Lua for execution on-the-fly. You'd need to know more about LOGO's detailed execution semantics than I do; if I have a sequence [FUNCTION1 arg FUNCTION2 arg arg] where FUNCTION1 redefines FUNCTION2 to only take one argument, what happens, for example?

But with that all figured out it might not be particularly hard, and ought to really fly... Lua is *good* at this sort of thing!

--
┌─── dg@cowlark.com ───── http://www.cowlark.com ─────
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│ "They laughed at Newton. They laughed at Einstein. Of course, they
│ also laughed at Bozo the Clown." --- Carl Sagan