Anyone ever really program in Pilot or Logo?

[ACML]

Both have pretty much been around from the beginning, but I have never met anyone who actually used Logo or Pilot. Is Logo, the son of Pilot? The Pilot cartridge is CX4018 and was targeted for the youth educational market. Atari BASIC, for only being an 8k ROM, was very well done and provided good graphics commands already. I'm just curious if anyone spent more than a few glances on either Logo or Pilot. One can find endless BASIC listings from users, but there is no plethora of Logo or Pilot code out there.

Edited November 15, 2013 by ACML

[tschak909]

LOGO and Pilot have very different histories.

 

LOGO was a LISP variant devised by child education researcher Seymour Papert (a student of child learning specialist Jean Piaget), that was intended to introduce kids to mathematics through the window of having a turtle (at first, an actual mechanical turtle robot device, later a visual cursor on a screen), draw shapes on paper.

 

PILOT, on the other hand, was devised by a psychologist at UCSF, as a means for creating learning tests.

 

The coincidence of both languages being developed by people with degrees in developmental psychology notwithstanding, the two languages have very different goals, and thus very different syntax.

 

LOGO, being a derivitive of LISP, essentially strips the parens from the S-Expressions that form LISP constructs, and makes it easier for kids to read, so you get things like:

 

FORWARD 50 (go forward 50 points)

RIGHT 45 (go right 45 degrees)

FORWARD 50

... and so on.

 

PILOT, however, having its roots in computer assisted learning, builds its structures to be able to create tests:

 

10 R: This program Is an example

20 T: Hi, This is an example program.

30 T: What is your name?

40 A: $NAME

50 T: Who is buried in Grant's Tomb?

60 A: $WHO

70 M: GRANT

80 Y: Yes, Grant was buried in Grant's Tomb!

90 N: No, $WHO wasn't buried in Grant's Tomb!

100 E:

 

The fact that Atari PILOT has turtle graphics, is an extension of the original PILOT language, and is not officially part of the language.

 

-Thom

[jhd]

I had a Coco growing up and a Logo cartridge was available for that system by 1983. Other than perhaps a review when it was first released, it received no media coverage -- the only code examples that I ever saw where in the manual.

 

The only program listings published were in BASIC or (rarely) assembly. Logo (presumably) did not have a very large installed base and, as noted above, it is a specialized language not really suitable for general programming.

[+CharlieChaplin]

Both have pretty much been around from the beginning, but I have never met anyone who actually used Logo or Pilot. Is Logo, the son of Pilot? The Pilot cartridge is CX4018 and was targeted for the youth educational market. Atari BASIC, for only being an 8k ROM, was very well done and provided good graphics commands already. I'm just curious if anyone spent more than a few glances on either Logo or Pilot. One can find endless BASIC listings from users, but there is no plethora of Logo or Pilot code out there.

 

Well,

 

I am not a programmer, but others did create quite some Pilot sources (collected on 3 images) and here and there you can find a few Logo sources. In the german magazine "Computer Kontakt" they published a mini-logo and several sources (examples) for it...

 

Of course the few source programs in Logo and Pilot are "nothing" compared to the hundreds of sources in Assembler and Action or the thousands of sources / listings in Basic. But on the other hand, there are also not many sources for Lisp (Inter-Lisp, ?Atari? Lisp), Pascal (Kyan Pascal, Draper Pascal, ?Atari? Pascal) and Forth (Fig-Forth, Antic-Forth, MESA-Forth, Volks-Forth, X-Forth) on the A8.

 

-Andreas Koch.

Pilot.src.zip

logo_src.zip

Edited November 15, 2013 by CharlieChaplin

[Fres]

I played around with LOGO quite a bit back in the day. My mom was a school teacher and they had Apple computers at her school and LOGO was very popular in educational environments back then. When Atari LOGO came out, my parents bought it. Years later, I used it for a college project. tschak909 offers a very good summary of LOGO without suggesting its AI roots. If I remember correctly, the students who used it were supposed to be teaching the computer how to do things based on Piaget's suggestion that one learns best by teaching someone else how to do something. "TO make a CIRCLE do this:" I'm beyond rusty, however. I could've thought up the whole thing five minutes ago without even realizing that I was having a mild stroke in the process.

Edited November 16, 2013 by Fres

[Matej]

Is there LISP for A800?

[Fres]

Is there LISP for A800?

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/116093-datasoft-inter-lisp65/

[Tinman]

I never really used LOGO for programming anything, but I did student-teach a computer class for kids at the local community college (it was part of their "college for kids" summer program). We taught the first half of the class using LOGO and the second half using BASIC. As I recall, the computers they had were Apple II's. I never had the LOGO or PILOT carts for my Atari, although I always wanted them both.

[kenjennings]

I had the Pilot cart and docs. Used it for a while... long enough to realize it was an inconvenient and not comprehensive language. Definitely a simple language for kids.

[potatohead]

LOGO saw a lot of use in education on the Apple ][. By the time I was in a position to try Atari LOGO, I had moved past the language was onto other things.

 

However, I did program on the Apple in LOGO quite a bit for about a year. One of the goals for the class was to develop some materials for subsequent classes. A few of us were taking it as an elective / free period kind of thing. We developed a nice collection of fun drawing programs and a fleshed out Lunar Lander type game. That one was presented a piece at a time with code going up on the overhead projector. Students were to participate in a lecture, Q&A session, then look at and discuss the code, finally typing it in, debugging and getting it to run. Once it did, it got saved off to a disk and over time all the parts to the game got done. On game build day, the main loop called out the various parts and the students all played their games. Extra credit was given for game variations and modifications. Some added wind, and the game ran with the turtle on and used as the ship. Some students hid the turtle and produced their own lander, which slowed their game considerably, but it looked really cool...

 

The rest consisted of some math programs that would plot functions, "drawing the students initials" and some text. Guess my number, a little adventure game kernel with a few rooms, etc...

 

I ended up helping deliver the class the following year. Most students did pretty well, and I personally thought that impressive for the time, given most of them had only school computer experience. A big part of the class was group debugging and learning. After lecture, kids would go type it all in and ended up making a surprisingly large number of bugs in the process. Groups of them would solve programs and the teacher and I would go around and patch things up for those that were not successful. We also kept some "in process" saves so they could just punt and pick up at a known place and continue on.

 

That proved essential. Most students got it done, but there were plenty of, "what did I do, and ????" kinds of events. They could go and get the pieces they needed and just continue on with no worries. The teacher factored that in, and I thought it really smart at the time. Students were required to submit some original programs throughout too. Those were most of the grade, with the idea being learn by doing, then show something was learned.

 

A year later Apple Pascal was introduced with the same formula. I participated in this, but not to the same degree. While Pascal was much faster, the barrier to entry for students was a lot higher and they did not see anywhere near the success they did with LOGO, or BASIC.

 

LOGO was, IMHO, very good for people who had very little exposure to computers. The LOGO students would more frequently make successful additions to the programming projects and would nearly always be exploring the fun geometry drawing possible. IMHO, part of this was how nicely the Apple package was put together. Editing and such was not difficult at all and the whole package just worked on "the disk", so they could stick it in, get used to understanding how things got stored and go. The students learned quite a few core computing concepts in a reasonably fun and interactive environment.

 

Applesoft was about the same, but the Pascal was too much at that time. Advanced students did lots of cool things, but there were only a few of those. Most everybody else went off and did the productivity thing with Apple Works and some drawing program or other, making various things like letters, flyers, etc...

 

All in all, very fun experiences. I really should have given the Atari LOGO a shot, but I had moved into assembly programming, CP/M and some other things by the time I had a shot at it. (didn't have my own machine prior)

 

The thing I remember the most was LOGO was very accessible. Didn't take much to get going. But it was SLOW on the Apple. Bet the Atari would have been better, but even 2X what the Apple would do just wasn't any good for interactive things, beyond fairly simple, small scope tasks.

 

Learning language only, if you ask me. But, I also think they hit the nail on the head for the time period too. In any case, that's probably why there was not more code floating around out there. Most people would very likely have jumped in and moved on. The lander game was one of the larger programs.

 

Met one guy in Denver as a kid who was into the AI bit. I got shipped out there to help an uncle rewire some apartment buildings and the one tenant who stayed had a couple of Apples, RAM card, Zip Chip, and was using LOGO to attempt some natural language parsing. His efforts were large, slow, but sort of worked. I remember thinking the INFOCOM stuff was actually better. (And I didn't know enough to realize the problem sets were that different back then.)

[tschak909]

PotatoHead: LOGO would be just fine for basic natural language processing, if yeah...a bit slow LOGO implementations are typically pidgin'd LISP interpreters, and lack many of even the classical optimizations of LISP interpreters of the time.

 

As for Infocom, they natively used a sort of LISP / MacSyma language fusion that the founders created while at MIT called MDL (pronounced Muddle), which was very well tuned to the problem of understanding natural language (at least, what those in those circles considered natural language at the time.) ...

 

http://retro.co.za/adventure/zork-mdl/

 

-Thom

[carlsson]

It would be interesting to hear from anyone who was exposed to LOGO as a child (or older) and later on learned LISP, if they had any head start from once studying LOGO. Personally, I had seen some listings in LOGO but never tried to understand them until a decade later when I learned LISP, looked back on the LOGO example listings and it struck me how similar the structure was.

[potatohead]

I've never attempted LISP. Just did FORTH recently. Very intriguing. That makes a person think much differently about this stuff. I'll put LISP on the list. Should be interesting. If I can remember, I'll post back one day.

 

LOGO really did a lot for me personally. Having used BASIC for a while, LOGO was strange at first, but I picked it up like that. Kind of amazing at the time. A few of us used it for all sorts of goofy, "what if?" kinds of programs that would take longer in BASIC. Both languages were responsible for me getting into first machine language, then assembly language. On that note, lots of people probably do not know that difference.

 

Back then, it was significant!

[Tinman]

As I mentioned before, I used LOGO in high school when I student-taught a programming class for kids. Later in college I took a comparative programming class in which we programmed in LISP, FORTH, and C. I never made the connection between LOGO and LISP, however! I had no idea they were related.

[Android8675]

I still have my Atari Logo, but at the time when I got it I found it inferrior to Apple Logo even though the Atari could do up to 4 turtles at once and full color where the Apple Logo at the time was typical green/black. Though maybe that was just because we didn't have color monitors at my school.

 

I still have a disk with a bunch of doodles I wrote in Logo. I could see about zipping them up for anyone curious.

[+hunmanik]

In our town a whole little generation of gradeschool kids learned some programming using Atari PILOT. I still have my small collection of stuff that we did. Our school system was an Atari-only school system, at first.

 

Unfortunately for me that was all before Atari Logo came out, so I was never exposed to it. When I checked out Atari Logo just a few years ago, I was really impressed with the implementation.

[potatohead]

Apple logo was color, BTW. It was just your screens.

 

No four turtle setup though.

[Tempest]

I never used Logo or Pilot, which is odd because our school had Apple's and Atari's. My wife used Logo for some stuff, but somehow I got passed by. My first language oddly enough was Pascal.

[+Gemintronic]

GWBASIC on the Tandy 1000 had logo-like drawing extensions. I once used the plotting commands to draw an awesome steam punk pirate space balloon for a shooter. Went from drawing the sprite on grid-paper to manually typing in the pen movements. Quite an accomplishment. Sadly, the ship was bigger than 16x16 so the Tandy 1000 was too slow to drag it around the screen properly.

[Fletch]

Logo had a strong influence of the creation of Scratch from MIT. My son and some classmates do quite a bit of programming with Scratch and have won awards in video game design contests using it.

 

http://scratch.mit.edu

Edited November 21, 2013 by Fletch

[Magic Knight]

I remember doing my computer education using a UK based BBC B computer which our techer had logo with a real turtle which wizzed around the floor (well moved eventually!)

 

I also remember thinking be only a matter of time before Rob the Robot from the NES could be interfaced with this to be a kick ass Machine! Never happened...