# The &kturtle; Handbook

Cies
Breijs

    cies AT kde DOT nl

Anne-Marie
Mahfouf

    annma AT kde DOT org

2004
Cies Breijs
&FDLNotice;
2004-11-8
0.6

&kturtle; is an educational programming environment using the &logo; programming language. The unique quality of LOGO is that the programming commands are translated to the language of the 'programmer' so he/she can program in his/her native language.

KDE
kdeedu
KTurtle
education
language
native
programming
code
Logo
instructions
turtle

## Introduction

&kturtle; is an educational programming environment using the &logo; programming language. The goal of &kturtle; is to make programming as easy and accessible as possible. This makes &kturtle; suitable for teaching kids the basics of math, geometry and... programming. The commands used to program are in the style of the &logo; programming language. The unique feature of the &logo; programming language is that the commands are often translated into the speaking language of the programmer.

&kturtle; is named after the turtle that plays a central role in the programming environment. The user programs the turtle, using the &logo; commands, to draw a picture on the canvas.

### What is &logo;?

The first version &logo; programming language was created by Seymour Papert of MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1967 as an offshoot of the LISP programming language. From then many versions of &logo; have been released. By 1980 &logo; was gaining momentum, with versions for MSX, Commodore, Atari, Apple II and IBM PC systems. These versions were mainly for educational purposes. LCSI released MacLogo in 1985 as a tool for professional programmers, but it never caught on. MIT is still maintaining a site on &logo; which can be found on http://el.media.mit.edu/logo-foundation/.

Today there are several versions of &logo; around which can easily be found on MIT's &logo; site and by a simple Google search. This version of &logo; (&kturtle;) is only focused on the educational qualities of the programming language and will not try to suit professional programmers' needs.

### Features of &kturtle;

&kturtle; has some nice features that make starting to program a breeze. See here some of the highlights of &kturtle; feature set:

- An integrated &logo; interpreter (no extra dependencies) that uses XML files for the command translations, supports user defined functions and dynamic type switching.

- The execution can be slown down, paused or stopped at any time.

- A powerful editor for the &logo; commands with intuitive syntax highlighting, line numbering and more.

- The canvas can be saved as an image or printed.

- The canvas has a wrapping mode (which is on by default) so the turtle cannot get lost too easily.

- Context help for all &logo; commands: Just press F2.

- The &logo; commands are fully translatable (at the moment of writing Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Slovenian, Serbian (Cyrillic and Latin), Spanish and Swedish are in &kde;).

- An error dialog that links the error messages to the mistakes in the program.

- Simplified programming terminology.

- Full-screen mode.

- Many integrated, internationalized example &logo; programs make it easy to get started.

&using-kturtle;

&getting-started;

&programming-reference;

&glossary;

&translator-guide;

## Credits and License

&kturtle;

Program copyright 2003-2005 Cies Breijs cies AT kde DOT nl

Contributors:

- Coding help, editor part: Anne-Marie Mahfouf annma AT kde DOT org

- Author of WSBASIC (http://wsbasic.sourceforge.net) which is the base for the interpreter of &kturtle;: Walter Schreppers Walter DOT Schreppers AT ua DOT ac DOT be

- German Data Files: Matthias Meßmer bmlmessmer AT web DOT de

- German Data Files: Burkhard Lück lueck AT hube-lueck DOT de

- Swedish Data Files: Stefan Asserhäll stefan DOT asserhal AT telia DOT com

- Slovenian Data Files: Jure Repinc jlp@holodeck1.com

- Serbian (Cyrillic and Latin) Data Files: Chusslove Illich caslav.ilic@gmx.net

- Italian Data Files: Pino Toscano toscano.pino@tiscali.it

- English GB Data Files: Andy Potter A.J.Potter@rhul.ac.uk

- Spanish Data Files: Rafael Beccar rafael.beccar@kdemail.net

- Brazilian Portuguese Data Files: Riverson Rios riverson@ccv.ufc.br

- Norwegian Nynorsk and Bokmål Data Files: Karl Ove Hufthammer karl@huftis.org

- Parser Cyrillic support: Albert Astals Cid astals11@terra.es

Documentation copyright 2004

- Cies Breijs cies AT kde DOT nl

- Anne-Marie Mahfouf annma AT kde DOT org

- Some proofreading changes by &Philip.Rodrigues; &Philip.Rodrigues.mail;

- Updated translation how-to and some proofreading changes by Andrew Coles andrew_coles AT yahoo DOT co DOT uk

&underFDL;

&underGPL;

## Installation

### How to obtain &kturtle;

&install.intro.documentation;

### Compilation and Installation

&install.compile.documentation;

&documentation.index;