Logo

Development Environment
Commands
Turtles
Procedures
Online Documentation
Printing and Exporting
Logo Programming Environment

Logo is a high-level programming language and visual development environment specifically designed for learning computer programming. The language supports both graphical output and text-based input/output, enabling development of a wide range of both simple and advanced programs.

By learning programming with Logo, you can build knowledge and practical experience of the core concepts of structured, procedural and functional languages, and a good foundation in computer programming.

Development Environment

The three-panel Logo screen is designed to provide you with a clear view of your program. Simply type your Logo commands into the code panel and click the Run button. Your program's graphical output will appear in the graphics panel and any text-based output in the I/O console panel. Your programs can also accept keyboard input via the I/O console.

The Logo interpreter detects both syntax and semantic errors within programs and instantly highlights the line of code that has raised the problem. Clear messages explain the reason for each error.

Logo programs can be saved as plain-text .logo files and re-opened within the Logo environment or in other text editors.

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Commands

Logo provides the following categories of commands:

• Data: commands that manipulate words (strings and numbers), lists and arrays. Combine words to create lists (also known as sentences), create new lists containing more or fewer items, search for items, sort lists, create stacks and queues, and perform other data manipulation tasks.
• Mathematical: use standard arithmetic operators, logical operators and bitwise operators, as well as trigonometric, logarithmic and other mathematical functions. Manipulate both integer and floating-point numbers.
• Graphical: draw shapes and text on the graphical window using vector-based movements or absolute coordinates. Use different line colours and thicknesses, and fill regions of the window with solid colours.
• Control: use standard procedural constructs, such as while loops, do-while loops, until loops, do-until loops, for loops, if statements, etc.
• I/O: output data to the console and read words and lists from the console.

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Turtles

Logo has a special concept known as the turtle, which is used to draw graphics. Each turtle has a current position and heading angle within the graphics area and can move in any direction, while drawing lines.

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A Logo program can have more than one active turtle.

Procedures

Logo supports user-defined procedures with multiple parameters. Procedures can return values, and support recursion. A program can contain several procedures defined in any order.

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Online Documentation

The Logo online documentation provides clear explanations of the programming language concepts and a detailed reference of all commands, operators and other language elements.

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Printing and Exporting

You can print your program code, graphical output and console output. Add page numbers and borders, and choose the resolution at which to print your graphics.

The console output can be saved as a plain text file and graphical output can be saved in a variety of image formats, such as PNG, JPEG and BMP.

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Logo Programming Environment

There are several implementations of the Logo programming language.

The hykelab Logo environment supports standard Logo commands as well as various hykelab-specific commands.

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