Xref: utzoo comp.edu:2300 comp.lang.pascal:1914 comp.sys.ibm.pc:29522 Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!uw-june!pattis From: pattis@june.cs.washington.edu (Richard Pattis) Newsgroups: comp.edu,comp.lang.pascal,comp.sys.ibm.pc Subject: Re: Karel the Robot Summary: Karel/Pascal Frogo/Turing Keywords: Wanted, Karel Message-ID: <8394@june.cs.washington.edu> Date: 31 May 89 02:41:21 GMT References: <915@psc90.UUCP> <89May28.161910edt.4608@turing.toronto.edu> Organization: U of Washington, Computer Science, Seattle Lines: 27 In article <89May28.161910edt.4608@turing.toronto.edu>, holt@turing.toronto.edu (Ric Holt) writes: > This is a bit of a red herring, but... > After studying Karel the Robot a bit, I got the feeling that the syntax was > pretty wordy and that Karel wasn't quite entertaining enough. Sooooo.... ************ ******************************** > > I've written a game called Frogo (the fabulous frog) (any resemblance to > Logo the langorous turtle a pure coincidence :-) )... > 1) Karel's syntax is designed to mimic Pascal (wordiness and all), because Karel is most often used as a prelude to Pascal courses. 2) Karel's language was designed to emphasize structural decomposition, logical deduction, and spatial reasoning (not calculation and algebraic reasoning). The language focuses purely on control structures; statements are controlled by sensing the state of the world (not by evaluating expressions over variables). Karel's world is complex enough to encode all sorts or problems, such as sorting (with no variables, much less array variables). 3) The Karel book is 106 pages short. It was designed as a short, direct introduction to programming with Pascal-like control structures. Within this restricted context, it explores many "interesting" issues in programming, and assumes the reader has had no programming experience. At present the book is in its 15th printing, and can be obtained in English Danish, Japanese, Italian, and Spanish.