Re: Low-level vs. High-level programming (was My First Computer)

["Randy McLaughlin" <randy@nospam.com>]

"Kelly Hall" <hall@priest.com> wrote in message
news:Lp%Ka.3924$Yw6.387@newssvr16.news.prodigy.com...
>
> "Randy McLaughlin" <randy@nospam.com> wrote in message
> news:Pp_Ka.616$Im5.226@fe03.atl2.webusenet.com...
> > Look at LOGO, a non computational computer programming language that was
> > little more than a toy (the same basic language was written into some
> toys).
>
> I think of Logo as basically Scheme with infix syntax.  From the
> comp.lang.logo FAQ:
>
> Logo was originally developed by Daniel Bobrow and Wallace Feurzeig at
> Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Inc., and Seymour Papert, at the Massachusetts
> Institute of Technology in the 1960's. (See "2: What was the genesis of
> Logo?" below.) It was based on the goal of allowing people to use
> computers to manipulate things more familiar than the then-prevalent
> numbers and equations. Logo borrowed the techniques of symbolic
computation
> (manipulating words and ideas) from the LISP programming language used
> in artificial intelligence research. Powerful computer science concepts
> of the procedure, recursion, programs-as-data are built into Logo.
>
> Logo is Turing-complete, making it a 'real' computer programming language.
> :)
>
> Kelly

It has been twenty years since I set up LOGO for nephew and niece, I had
forgotten that it could even save variables.

LOGO is not "Turing-complete".  You miss the point of "Turing-complete":
The Turing Engine was a definition of what we now call a digitial computer,
it has nothing to do with the computer programming languages.  I know of no
computer programming language that is "Turing-complete".  Turing engines can
be shown (emulated) on any computer that I am aware of, that does not mean
that any computer programming language is "Turing-complete".