Symbolic Computing with Logo: An Introduction
This article introduces the reader to the world of symbolic computing using a language that is usually thought of as a child’s educational programming language — Logo. I’ll start by describing what symbolic computing is and then dive right into a whirlwind tour of the Logo programming language. In future articles I’ll spend more time demonstrating how to use Logo to write some powerful programs. I hope that this article series encourages you to explore symbolic programming using Logo or another symbolic language, such as Lisp or Scheme.
A Brief History of the Logo Programming Language in Education
Logo was initially developed in the 1960s by the late educational computer scientist Seymour Papert and his colleagues in the Artificial Intelligence laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Logo is most famous for its turtle graphics, which allowed children (and adults) to create complex geometrical shapes and patterns by moving a virtual turtle around on the screen with commands such as Forward 50, Right 90, Forward 100. Here is a video of turtle graphics in action.
Logo and turtle graphics became popular during the 1970s as a way to teach K-12 students computer programming via turtle graphics. Logo was also used to teach mathematics, especially geometry since a…
