[Edu-sig] Python flavoured Scratch

[Jurgis Pralgauskis]

Hi,

probably most of You know Scratch
http://info.scratch.mit.edu/Educators

I thought it has quite some pythonic approach
(especially, because it is easy to learn),
so I tried to "localize" it to Python ;)...
You can see the results (and comparison screenshots)
http://files.akl.lt/users/jurgis/scratch/python_flavour/

well, parentheses seem to get in a way a bit..
value assignment "=" and "+=" looks ok
also clauses look nice -- other languages wouldn't manage this ;)

there are problems with placeholders order for lists, but it will be
fixed for Scratch 1.4 (comming in 2 weeks)
http://scratch.mit.edu/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=130068

also there is problem with logical equality comparison
it is hardcoded somewhere, so I can't change "=" to "==" :/
(but Scratch is opensourced, so this is quite feasible :))

Also Scratch uses messages instead of functions.
this is more like throwing/catching exceptions, but still different
so I left this as is  "When message <blabla> received"


ps.: What's the use of all this?
well, students could get more used to python while Scratching
then it is possible to export Scratch scripts to xml with Chirp
http://www.chirp.scratchr.org/
so one can translate them to python

Scratch quite follows LOGO paradigm,
so xturtle could be mapped to it somehow, I guess..

by the way,  XO TurtleArt has python bindings
http://tonyforster.blogspot.com/2009/02/using-python-blocks-in-turtleart.html


-- 
Jurgis Pralgauskis
Don't worry, be happy and make things better ;)
http://sagemath.visiems.lt