Special characters spoiled when getting simple file using READLIST
A Logo programming environment for Microsoft Windows
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#550 Special characters spoiled when getting simple file using READLIST
It seems to be easy: Create a file by writing a sentence into the simple Windows editor, store it, go to the wxfmslogo-6.35.0-commander and get this file and its only line by means of READLIST. But what happens is that all special language characters (in this case German) are spoiled. Please see this effect in the attachment.The same thing happens, when you create the file with Notepad++ instead of Windows Editor and make sure that it is UTF-8 by converting to UTF-8. (By the way: All Logo versions after wxfmslogo-6.35.0 crash when I try to run my programs with them - that means that they vanish completely and at once from the screen and I cannot trace why) - See attachment
Related
FMSLogo versions prior to 8.0.0 are ANSI programs. In case you are not familiar with this notion, it means that FMSLogo can only read characters that match the system code page, which for you should be German (Latin 1), but maybe not. A UTF-8 "unicode signature" (BOM) at the start of the file will cause it to fail to load, so the files must be saved as ANSI text. However, I was not aware of any crashes.
Can you attach the program you use to crash FMSLogo? I don't have a good way to transcribe it from your screenshot.
FMSLogo 8.0.0 will support the Unicode BMP, which might alleviate some of your pain. This has not been released and won't be released for many months. However, I can attach a pre-release version to this ticket if you'd like to test it.
Thank you for your comprehensive reply. To have some test-material, I
wrote a short program in three versions - coded ANSI, coded UTF-8, and
coded UTF-8 BOM - see attachments -, all based on an example in the
logo-help-section. The encoding has been done by means of Notepad++.
The good news: After installation of Logo 7.7 all three versions worked
without crash. So I think that the crashes observed with this
Logo-version with other Logo-programs we wrote may be somehow "private"
and can be fixed by rebuilding the code.
The other problem (spoiled Latin-1-characters) nevertheless remains:
If I load the ANSI-version, all goes well and nothing is spoiled.
If I load the UTF-8 or UTF-8-BOM-Version, our German special
characters all are spoiled - both when reading the program by means of
WINDOWSFILEEDIT and when loading and when executing it after having it
loaded, especially procedure A. No other bug appears.
By the way - you were right when recommending WINDOWSFILEEDIT as better
way to editing. It works well.
Nevertheless, I'd be very grateful, if you could send me a preliminary
version of FMSLogo 8.0 for testing purposes.
By the way: Is it possible to have two FMSLogo-versions running on one
Windows-10-system at the same time?
All this may be very important, as we consider to base some of our
future basic courses for 12 to 15 years old youveniles on FMSLogo
instead of Python as we did so far. One reason is the way FMSLogo
inspires creativity and provides a good learning curve. The other is an
easier switch to HTML, CSS, and Javascript and in the long run
frameworks and the backend (still many miles away). Surprisingly from
the view of beginners there are more similarities between HTML and JS on
the one hand and FMSLogo instead of Python on the other.
We also experimented with Scratch, snap!, Netlogo, and even the very
versatile PureBasic, but were not convinced - as we have educational
purposes in mind. But we will have to justify our decisions as we work
for a project set up by NRW-government authorities in Germany.
Still two remarks: Even for German students we prefer the English
version of FMSLogo, because it looks "international" (as does the WWW)
and students normally get used to it very soon. And even without the
turtle(s) FMSLogo remains a good educational tool.
After all, we will have to be sure, that FMSLogo is reliable and in
active maintanace or even development.
Again, thank you very much.
Manfred
Dr.-Ing. Manfred Zindel
Diplom-Mathematiker
mz@pbreport.de +49(0)176-34478812
Inhaber und Geschäftsführer
--
pbreport e.K.
Arbeitsgruppe für wissenschaftliche Evaluation
und Verlag - gegründet 2001
Sebastianstr. 43, 33178 Borchen (Dörenhagen)
HR Paderborn A 2466
Am 29.09.2020 um 00:36 schrieb David Costanzo:
Related
Bugs:
#550I have attached a pre-release version to this ticket. You may have to log into SourceForge to download it.
Even in FMSLogo 8.0.0, the UTF-8 BOM is required. The reason is for backward compatibility with programs written for FMSLogo 7.X and below. If there's no BOM, then it's treated as ANSI.
I tried to load your
testthingsUTF8BOM.lgoversion and the German characters were garbled. However, even notepad.exe didn't recognize the German characters in this file. As you can see, the file doesn't start with a BOM:The first three bytes should be 0xEF, 0xBB, 0xBF.
Yes. If you open a file with FMSLogo, it will open a new instance.
If memory serves, I added the "single instance" functionality because, in my workshop of young children (6 yrs old - 10 yrs old) who were not confident with a mouse, sometimes they would single click, sometimes they would click, move the mouse, and click, sometimes they would double-click. In no case was the child patient, so they would keep trying until something happened. Without this functionality, a dozen instances of FMSLogo would open at the same time, which would confuse the child and detract from the learning experience that I had designed. The "single instance" functionality happens if you double-click on the desktop icon because, presumably all instances that start with an empty workspace are identical and there's no reason to want multiple ones. However, if you double-click on a .lgo file, it will open a new instance because in this case the new instance would have a different workspace than whatever one was loaded in the other instance.
If this is a problem then open a feature request proposing a way to open a second instance while still protecting young children from their impatience.
A German student told me as much. I make sure that all translated versions of FMSLogo understands English Logo. The German version has a German UI and a German manual, so I thought it would be better than English. However, the German student said that the German manual was so bad that it made him want to cry. I think it was written by a well-intentioned technology enthusaist, not an educator. The English version was written by an educator (Brian Harvey).
So as not to make false promises: I promise nothing. I currently have only about four hours a week to devote to FMSLogo. The good news is that the code is GPL. If I disappear tomorrow there is no legal barrier to prevent someone else from maintaining the code base. In fact, most of my development effort has been to facilitate this, although no one else has shown interest.
With four hours a week, you can expect answers to 1-3 questions a month and small fixes, but no large features.
I'll add one more criterion to your search: child safety. FMSLogo collects no statistics and does not direct children to any web sites where they could interact with strangers.
I'll add another criterion to your search: large user community base. In this respect Python and JavaScript beat Logo a thousand-fold. The Logo community is small and fragmented. If you decide to pursue using FMSLogo, you'd also have to build your own community.
Hello,
Thanks a lot for sacrificing a part of your 4-hours-a-week-time-window
to solve my problems. But I think, it was worthwile.
8.0.0pre works fine so far, and as you announced, ANSI and UTF-8-BOM do
no harm to my German letters, but UTF-8 without BOM does. The
Windows-10-editor seems to add no BOM, and so I will have to alter this.
Concerning WINDOWFILEEDIT ...
I managed to find a good workflow to develop programs using
WINDOWFILEEDIT with a file in the working-directory. So it is easy to
load it without a lengthy path after saving and exiting.
Concerning more instances ...
I see no point in running more than one FMSLogo-instance at the same
time, especially when learning. Even adults will find their screen
cluttered and can't always tell which instance is which. What I wanted
was to have more than one version (not instance) installed at the same
time on the same computer side by side. For instance, if I install
8.0.0, the installer tells me that there is an older version and forces
me to have it uninstalled. I don't need to let two different versions
run at the same time, but I'd like to do it sequentially without having
to switch installations.
Concerning the German version ...
I think it is a good thing to translate the manual and a tutorial. If
there is an original text, the translation should be more or less
useful. But when I saw the German FMSLogo, I found that even keywords
and commands had been translated. Seymour Papert's turtle had become an
"Igel" (hedgehog), perhaps for brevity, and had to go "links" and
"rechts" and sometimes found the command "wiederhole" instead of
repeat. The disadvantage is that in this way children are not prepared
for international communication in informatics in later years. When
children are used to international terminology from the start, they can
in later years more easily communicate with Britain, the US, Canady, and
Australia, with other European countries and even with China, Russia,
Belarus and many others. And it is easy for them, they are used to it in
Germany. If we resume our FMSLogo courses, we will have to write course
material in German, and of course with international terminology and
English keywords.
Concerning the future of FMSLogo ...
Is there an open, more or less documented source of FMSLogo which can be
well understood, and in which language is it written, C++ perhaps? We
already tried to extend FMSLogo by loaded FMSLogo-procedures which are
then buried. If I remember well, you said years ago that there is an old
Borland version involved which goes undocumented and without mainenance.
For the moment we consider FMSLogo as our future language for documented
courses (12 to 15 years old students). It could be the introductory
part of a stack which goes on with HTML, CSS, and JS and ends with
singlepage frontend applications and backend-APIs and -databases,
perhaps using NodeJS and Express.
When and while we discuss the decision with our partners from ZdI
(Zukunft durch Innovation - future by innovation, a program of the
NRW-State-government), we would like to tell you and ask you again for
your opinion, which is of great value for us.
Best regards
Manfred
Dr.-Ing. Manfred Zindel
Diplom-Mathematiker
mz@pbreport.de +49(0)176-34478812
Inhaber und Geschäftsführer
--
pbreport e.K.
Arbeitsgruppe für wissenschaftliche Evaluation
und Verlag - gegründet 2001
Sebastianstr. 43, 33178 Borchen (Dörenhagen)
HR Paderborn A 2466
Am 03.10.2020 um 04:03 schrieb David Costanzo:
Related
Bugs:
#550Is that
WINDOSFILEEDITor some other editor you're using? FMSLogo 8.0.0 is supposed to save with a UTF-8 BOM if anything in the workspace is not ASCII.It's not documented anywhere, but the auto-completion shortcut is Ctrl+Space. For example, type
FORCtrl+Spacebar.That's a feature of the installer, not a requirement of FMSLogo. If you look around under the Files tab, you'll find ZIP files. Alternatively, you can install FMSLogo and copy the installation directory someplace safe, then install a new version. Multiple versions of FMSLogo can run side-by-side. In fact, I have all versions that I have ever released on my hard disk.
That was one another complaint of the aforementioned German student. See Feature Request #104. You could update the translation and/or provide an alternate manual if you like. You could add better translations for the procedure names. I'd require that the old procedure names still work for backward compatibility with old programs, but they could be hidden and buried.
It's written in a rudimentary C++. Take a look for yourself. If you log into SourceForge you can get the source code. There's a file called HOWTO-BUILD.TXT (sourceforge.net) which explains how to set up a development environment, get the source code, and compile it.
That's the best way. FMSLogo can also call into DLLs if you need faster procedures. Since FMSLogo is 32-bit, you have to compile a DLL as 32-bits. I hope to start working on a 64-bit FMSLogo in the future, which wouldn't be able to call a 32-bit DLLs .
By the way, all of this correspondance is being publically logged in the bug you opened about "special language characters". SourceForge makes a mess of email. If you log in to view the bug, you'll see what I mean. I'll eventually close this bug as fixed in 8.0.0, but I don't want to interrupt our conversation.
Related
Feature Requests:
#104Hello,
Well, all bugs are fixed so far - the only exception is the
newline-problem, which is of minor importance. Thank you for your help,
and we can close most tickets now.
Nevertheless I agree that we should continue this conversation - maybe
off the records without a ticket -, because there remains the question
of how to go ahead with FMSLogo in the German educational field.
pbreport was founded in 2001 already and has since been following the
shifts of the educational market just to survive. But in fact we still
(or again) behave like a startup.
So we'd like to talk with our partners in order to make a good plan for
our further co-operation with ZdI, the project of the NRW-government
dealing with preparing professional education in Northrhine-Westfalian
schools. (NRW is the biggest federal state in Germany.)
We already decided to work with the JavaScript-related ecosystem, but
still we need a good introductory language - both for teaching beginners
and for those who'd like to go on with informatics as adults - not as
professionals, but just for creativity, private projects, and fun. This
could be FMSLogo, because it is - as someone called it - "fundamentally
sound" and delivers a very good overview of thinking patterns in
informatics. Besides, it has a good chance to become teacher's darling
because of its turtle(s) and its instant-response-interaction.
JS itself has a big problem which makes it difficult to use for
introductory courses: it needs a complicated backend connection to allow
real persistent data-storage and retrieval. The very good P5.js (a
JS-oriented derivative of Processing) suffers from the same shortcoming,
Python needs fumbling with indentation, Java needs a pretty abstract
overhead, Scratch looks too childish, Snap! is on its way but has not
yet arrived, LibreLogo is too incomplete, NetLogo is too specialized
a.s.o. All this stuff we have been investigating during the last three
years.
It will take us approximately two weeks to take our decisions and make a
plan. Then I'll be back here to ask you for your opinion.
Best regards
Manfred
Dr.-Ing. Manfred Zindel
Diplom-Mathematiker
mz@pbreport.de +49(0)176-34478812
Inhaber und Geschäftsführer
--
pbreport e.K.
Arbeitsgruppe für wissenschaftliche Evaluation
und Verlag - gegründet 2001
Sebastianstr. 43, 33178 Borchen (Dörenhagen)
HR Paderborn A 2466
Am 03.10.2020 um 22:50 schrieb David Costanzo:
Related
Bugs:
#550Hello,
some weeks ago I announced that I am looking for a way to use FMSLogo
for pre-professional education of 12 to 16 years old boys and girls.
This would have been to be applied in an experimental set of school
courses in and around Paderborn, NorthRhine-Westfalia, Germany. To
convince myself and others who asked me I wrote a productive application
of more than 1300 lines on a level of students of this age. The purpose
was, as often, to produce a series of "intelligent" print documents on
the basis of an EXCEL-table. I used a selection of auxiliary procedures
which I wrote some tie ago in FMSLogo itself. I performed a project like
this some years ago, and this was a new design and version.
The production workflow was based on a cooperation of FMSLogo with
Notepad++. This was efficient and less complicated than fumbling with
windowfileedit, and the 8pre-version you sent me worked pretty well and
proved to be an excellent tool. I told others about this success, and
now I think that - from an educational point of view - FMSLogo is a
better choice than another language, for example Python. Nevertheless
there are some flaws, and I'd like to discuss my ideas with you.
For the moment I have a lot of other work to do, and Corona causes a lot
of difficulties. But I'd like to get back to you as soon as I've got a
little more time.
Best regards
Manfred
Dr.-Ing. Manfred Zindel
Diplom-Mathematiker
mz@pbreport.de +49(0)176-34478812
Inhaber und Geschäftsführer
--
pbreport e.K.
Arbeitsgruppe für wissenschaftliche Evaluation
und Verlag - gegründet 2001
Sebastianstr. 43, 33178 Borchen (Dörenhagen)
HR Paderborn A 2466
Am 03.10.2020 um 22:50 schrieb David Costanzo:
Related
Bugs:
#550You can also take a look at the FMSLogo Extras. Most were written by adults, but I think Sudoku was written by a student in your target age range.
By the way, when you respond, it's better to do so by logging into SourceForge instead of replying by email. If you do reply by email, the conversion will be easier for others to follow if you remove all of the previous content instead of adding to the top. Try reading this conversation to see what I mean. It's hard to see who's responding to whom.
Related
Bugs:
#550This bug report was about supporting UTF-8. This will be supported in FMSLogo 8.0.0. As previously mentioned, I am closing this as a duplicate of Feature Request #123.
Related
Feature Requests:
#123