I spent the day working with my friend Dave Woldrich (of CardMeeting infamy). He brought out a couple of old COMPUTE!'s Gazette issues and we reminisced about how we learned to program.
Here's a fun Turtle BASIC-ish program we put together in a couple of minutes. The syntax isn't quite authentic, but writing a little language for this would be easy.
10 CLEAR 20 SET counter, turns 30 SHOW turtle 40 MOVETO turtle, 160, 10 50 PENDOWN turtle 60 FACE turtle, 90 70 IF counter LT 0 GOTO 130 80 PENCOLOR turtle, RANDOM * 255 90 WALK turtle, steps 100 TURN turtle, degrees 110 SET counter, counter - 1 120 GOTO 70 130 PENUP turtle
To draw a circle, set turns to 360 and degrees to 1. To draw a square, set degrees to 90 and turns to 4. steps is the number of pixels in length of a side of the polygon.
As silly as this is (and over 25 years since writing a program like this), the nostalgia factor is immense.
I hope this inspired you to work on a parrot implementation!
I remember doing turtle on the old BBC micro.
Re:Parrot implementation?
chromatic on 2009-05-26T23:07:05
We didn't prototype it in Parrot, but there's a definite possibility there.
I remember doing turtle on the old BBC micro.
Snap! The BBC micro at my primary school was the first machine I ever programmed on, about two thirds of my life ago. That was a fun machine...
