Re: LOGO-L> dynamic programming projects and speed of MicroWorlds

[George Mills <mills@softronix.com>]

One important key to responsiveness is Event driven programming.

You are 100% correct, doing loop forever tests is not a good thing.

You want the "Event" your looking for to "trigger" the code to
execute. Rather than the code spending all it's resources looking
(polling) for the "Event".

MicroWorlds I believe does have some "event driven" concepts
and I know MSWLogo does :-). KEYBOARDON, MOUSEON, SETTIMER, NETWORKON,
BUTTONCREATE, PLAYWAVE are event driven.

There is an example of a MIDI organ that tracks up to 4 simultaneous
"Notes" keyed in any order and released in any order. It runs just
as well on a 286 as a Pentium Pro. And you can push and hold a bunch
of keys at once or zip your fingers across the key board and it just
gently flows along as if it was an real instrument.

Event driven is a tricky model to get used to once you've learned the
polling model. But for young students the event driven model should be
just
as easy to learn as polling method. It took me several years to get used
to it.

The "Event Driven" solutions tend to be very simple, elegant and
efficient.

But keep in mind that Logo is interpreted and can be anywhere from
10-1000
times slower than a compiled language depending on which logo and what
your
doing. But with today's machines Logo should be able to do animation
reasonably
fast.

RAY CATZEL wrote:
> 
> However powerful the PC becomes, we will find ways of using up the resources.
> One would think that the kids could have the freedom to construct anything
> using a powerful Pentium. Perhaps it is important for the kids to realize the
> finite capacity of these enormously powerful systems (when compared with those
> of just a few years ago). On the other hand, we do want to let their
> imaginations and creativity have a reasonable means of expression.
> 
> The typical situation is when the kids establish many turtles that have to
> behave differently depending on their location on the screen or proximity to
> other objects (turtles).
> 
> What suggestions do you Microworlders have to optimize performance of projects.
> For example: Instead of testing whether a turtle has touched a colour you can
> invoke a procedure by attaching a procedure to the colour instead of repeating
> the "if colorunder = " test in a forever loop.
> 
> Question for LCSI:  How do the authors of "Incredible Machines" produce such a
> responsive environment compared to MicroWorlds?
> 
> Ray Catzel
> President  ComputerPals
> Email:  learn@computerpals.on.ca
> Internet:  http://www.computerpals.on.ca/~pals
> 
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
> Please post messages to the Logo forum to logo-l@gsn.org.  Mail
> questions about the list administration to logofdn@gsn.org.  To
> unsubscribe send    unsubscribe logo-l    to majordomo@gsn.org.

-- 
===============================================================
George Mills
email: mills@softronix.com
http://www.softronix.com
The www page contains some very powerful educational software.
Our single most important investment is our kids.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Please post messages to the Logo forum to logo-l@gsn.org.  Mail
questions about the list administration to logofdn@gsn.org.  To
unsubscribe send    unsubscribe logo-l    to majordomo@gsn.org.