Path: news.media.mit.edu!grapevine.lcs.mit.edu!olivea!hal.com!decwrl!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!swrinde!cs.utexas.edu!math.ohio-state.edu!magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!agate!anarres.CS.Berkeley.EDU!bh From: bh@anarres.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Brian Harvey) Newsgroups: comp.lang.logo Subject: Re: Boxer questions Date: 19 Jan 1994 04:44:04 GMT Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 31 Message-ID: <2hidqk$cfj@agate.berkeley.edu> References: <1994Jan18.154610.101@magill.unisa.edu.au> NNTP-Posting-Host: anarres.cs.berkeley.edu Boxer is not yet generally available. Until quite recently, you had to have a Sun workstation to run it, but now there is a version for (largeish) Macs. But it's still in development. Andy diSessa has given copies to a few people for research purposes, but a general release is still in the future. Boxer is meant to be an extension of Logo, much as Microworlds and Object Logo are, but in a different direction. I don't think anyone sees Boxer and Logo as being in any way antagonistic. Boxer includes the standard Logo stuff like turtle graphics and word/sentence operations, in exactly the Logo style. The main new thing in Boxer is that both programs and data structures are visually represented on the screen using the metaphor of nested boxes. For example, if you have a list like [A B C] as the value of some variable, in Logo you have to use a PRINT instruction to see it, but in Boxer there would be a box on the screen with A B C inside it. If you have a list of lists, like [[RUM RAISIN] [CHERRY VANILLA]], then the box on the screen will contain two smaller boxes. You can control the degree of detail that is visible at any time, because a box can be open (so you can see what's in it) or closed (so you only see a small opaque rectangle). The same thing applies to programs. Each procedure is a box; within that box, each instruction is a box, and sometimes so are parts of instructions, like REPEAT 5 . There are lots of other ways in which Boxer is different from Logo, but mostly they are implications of this box metaphor. It's pretty neat. Disclaimer: I am not a Boxer spokesperson. Ask Andy diSessa if you want the official scoop.