# The &kturtle; Handbook

Cies
Breijs

    cies AT kde DOT nl

Anne-Marie
Mahfouf

    annma AT kde DOT org

Mauricio
Piacentini

    piacentini AT kde DOT org

2004
Cies Breijs
2004
2007
&Anne-Marie.Mahfouf;
2007
Mauricio Piacentini
&FDLNotice;
2008-08-20
0.8 beta (&kde; 4.2)

&kturtle; is an educational programming environment that uses &turtlelang;, a programming language inspired by &logo;. The main quality of &turtlelang; is that the programming commands can be translated to the language of the 'programmer' so he/she can program in his/her native language and &kturtle; programming language reproduces this feature.

KDE
kdeedu
KTurtle
education
language
native
programming
code
&logo;
instructions
turtle

## Introduction

&kturtle; is an educational programming environment that uses &turtlelang;, a programming language loosely based on and inspired by &logo;. 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. One of the main features of &turtlelang; is the ability to translate the commands 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 &turtlelang; commands, to draw a picture on the canvas.

### What is &turtlelang;?

&turtlelang;, the programming language used in &kturtle;, is heavily inspired by some of the fundamental concepts of the &logo; programming language. The first version of &logo; 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 &Mac;&logo; 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.

In comparison with most modern versions of &logo;, &turtlelang; implements only the basic commands best suited for the educational purposes of the language, and does not try to fulfill professional programmer's 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 &turtlelang; interpreter (no extra dependencies) that includes the ability to use a fully translated set of commands, and supports user defined functions and dynamic type switching.

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

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

- The canvas can be saved as an image.

- The &turtlelang; commands are fully translatable.

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

- Simplified programming terminology.

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

&using-kturtle;

&getting-started;

&programming-reference;

&glossary;

&translator-guide;

## Credits and License

&kturtle;

Program copyright 2003-2007 Cies Breijs cies AT kde DOT nl

Documentation copyright 2004, 2007

- 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;

## Command Index