LOGO-L> Re: MswLogo

[George Mills <mills@softronix.com>]

If your a developer, I think you'll find MSWLogo offers more commands
with BITMAPs than any other logo. It also deals with any color depth
unlike most logos and prints in any color depth. It supports memory to
memory operations for blinding speed, raster operations to masking etc.
I don't want to bloat the language for few experts that may use the
feature.

All you have to do is load your bitmaps "through the screen" before you
start your application (if you don't want to disturb the screen). It's
done this way for simplicity for younger students.

It does take a little getting used to.

Jim Burns wrote:
> 
> >Once you have the bitmaps in the buffers they don't ever have to go onto
> >the screen again
> 
> Again.  Ok, so I've still been looking for confirmation of this point:
> There is no way to load a bitmap into a buffer without displaying it on
> screen first.  By your statement above I'm assuming I'm correct on this point.
> 
> >(you just map that turtle or unmap it). Load up the
> >1024
> >buffers up front. The "Disk" is the bottle neck not the screen (it's
> >actually all in memory) but your just viewing that memory, the fact that
> >it
> >goes through the screen really is not a performace problem.
> 
> Sure it's a performance problem.  The fact that it may not be the relative
> bottleneck compared to disk access is irrelavent.  The fact is, it is a
> silly idea to load a bitmap into your buffer by loading it into memory,
> displaying it on screen, and then force the user to "cut" it from the
> screen into a buffer when it just simply does not have to be this way.
> 
> What should we do?  Move the turtle to some out of the way clear area of
> the screen just to load the bitmap, have it display on screen, then cut it
> saving it into a buffer and then move the turtle back to its original
> position so it can continue?  Either that or we've got to load all our
> turtles up front so we can do a CS before really starting our program,
> because once our program begins, doing a CS to clean up with the current
> method may not be what we want to do.  And that IS a performance issue.
> For example, in my program I may use 15 different bitmaps as turtles, but
> never together, only 1 at any given time.  So even if I could overlook the
> setup involved, which causes screen flicker and possibly just "junk" for
> the user to watch, it would mean I'd have the overhead of all 15 bitmaps
> and turtles when I only need 1 at any given time.  And that's inefficient
> anyway you slice it.
> 
> >What your asking for is BITLOADTOINDEX I guess.
> 
> That would be a good design addition.
> 
> Look I think MSWLogo is great.  And while it doesn't have all the bells and
> whistles that some of the other versions do, at its core, of all the pc
> Logo's I've tried, I like your interface the best.  But, the commercial
> versions do offer more options, and this mapping a bitmap to the turtle is
> one of them.  In other versions it's just a matter of selecting the turtle
> index and setting the image.  As a developer myself I do find myself
> questioning they way you handle this.  But as a logo customer, I'm just
> trying to find a full-featured Logo package for my 8 yr old daughter.  Now,
> if I could only find one that also had your interface style.  The things
> I've seen.....  :)
> 
> Thanks for the feedback,
> 
> -- Jim Burns
>      Technology Dynamics
>        Pearland, Texas
>          281.485.7186 / 281.485.0410
>            jimburns@technologydynamics.com
> 
> "There is always a trade-off to letting the machine do all the work.  It's
> not always a good one!"

-- 
===============================================================
George Mills (mills@softronix.com)
http://www.softronix.com/
The www page contains some very powerful educational software.
Our single most important investment is our kids.
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