🚀 go-pugleaf

There are tremendous tensions upon a language designed

a) for elementary kids, 
b) for teenagers, or 
c) for system development

Without a tight audience, languages get creeping features.  Witness
Ada or Common Lisp. Witness SCHEME, which first came out as "lean and
mean" language, which could fit with a editor and compiler into a 640k
PC, to the current "kitchen sink" version, which I saw advertized as
requiring 12M memory on a 386!

One could easily write a syntactic sugar front end for common lisp or
scheme to avoid the dreaded parenthesis, and get a compilable LOGO
with performance. but I dont think the kid orientation of LOGO
should be changed. 

But, in the competition for kid attention, LOGO is at a definite loss
to gee-whiz mind-candy like KIDPIX.  This could be fixed by
implementing fancy brushes, lassos (so areas of the screen could be
pulled by harness turtles?), and bitblt for animation would allow LOGO
programs which could, for example, do like KIDPIX and
count down and blow up the screen.

Hmm, perhaps the real question is what could a new LOGO look like 
if it were based on the Silicon Graphics library...



-- 
Jordan Pollack                            Assistant Professor
CIS Dept/OSU                              Laboratory for AI Research
2036 Neil Ave                             Email: pollack@cis.ohio-state.edu
Columbus, OH 43210                        Phone: (614)292-4890 (then * to fax)