LOGO-L> Re: ToonTalk versus MicroWorlds

["Ken Kahn" <KenKahn@ToonTalk.com>]

Brian Harvey <bh@anarres.CS.Berkeley.EDU> wrote in message
news:768i3j$46f$1@agate.berkeley.edu...
>I don't think this is true.  I bet in TT you could put a zero in a box,
>leave it there unchanged all the time, and then put your scale between
>that zero and the variable you're counting down.  It's just that in TT
>you have to take the extra step of building a box and putting a zero in it,
>whereas in MW (or any Logo) you say IF :N=0 ... and it doesn't feel like
>an extra step.
>

Brian is right, in ToonTalk you can define factorial in many ways. For those
who have downloaded ToonTalk, you can check out a recursive and a doubly
recursive version at www.toontalk.com/English/programs.htm. The doubly
recursive factorial could, in theory, compute factorial of 1000 or the like
using lots of processors. (ToonTalk doesn't currently support bignums but as
discussed in the other thread, one could implement them as boxes of numbers.
ToonTalk currently runs only on a single processor but was designed so it
could run on multiple processors.)

I woke up this morning thinking I should implement a tiny Lisp interpreter
in ToonTalk to illustrate its universality. A friend suggested Logo,
instead. My guess is that the implementing a parser for Logo is more work
than implementing "eval" and "apply" in Lisp. Is that right?

Best,

-ken kahn (www.toontalk.com)






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