A satirical message about how to improve the ToonTalk environment:

The following is by Eric Scharff, a student in Wayne Citrin's class on Visual Programming at the University of Colorado, sent to the class about how we might improve ToonTalk environment:

Subject: Extending ToonTalk

ToonTalk provides an arcade world for the fundamentals of computation, but perhaps it could benefit from a few additions that make programming simpler. Here is one attempt at such an extension.

ToonTalk introduced us to such memorable characters as Marty the Martian, Tooly the tool chest, Dusty the vacuum cleaner, and Pumpy the bicycle pump. While these tools provide a fun and complete programming world, some additions to the ToonTalk family may ease the burden of producing games in this post-Pong world.

Our first new character is Dumpy, the garbage truck. Dumpy performs garbage collection in the ToonTalk city. It's Dumpy's job to remove the mess left by careless construction workers and robots that don't use bombs. When the robots in a house stop performing a task, Dumpy forecloses on their property. Soon, a wrecking ball arrives at the scene, demolishing the refuse created by the idle tenants. Dumpy clears up the debris and returns the robots to you, as the Mayor of ToonTalk doesn't allow homeless robots.

Some visual languages allow you to view your programs at multiple levels of abstraction. In order to get more views on the action, we can call on the services of Blurry the telescope. If we go up to the roof with Blurry, we can spy on the computations in other houses. We can even zoom in and out to see the progress of our neighborhood of systolic computations. However, Blurry has some manners and will not allow you to look in on houses of robots who have asked to be private.

Slowly the snail provides debugging and editing to the ToonTalk players. Unlike many Americans, Slowly knows how to program and use a VCR. One can hand robots and data to Slowly, who will eventually come back with a TV and remote control. The user can then use the remote control to watch, rewind, fast forward, or stop the group of robots. You can also insert new steps or delete incorrect ones by updating the appropriate place in the recording. A special bird will return the remote to you if it gets lost inside the ToonTalk couch.

Slowly provides some of the functionality of execution control, but we would also like inspection and breakpoints. Therefore, we round out the cast of characters with Nosy, the nose. Nosy, the boss of all of the robots and construction crews is ToonTalk's symbolic debugger. If you send Nosy with your crews, he can sniff out specific variable states, robot actions, or other conditions. If these conditions are met, Nosy will sneeze, startling the robots and stopping execution. You may then fly over and see what Nosy was allergic to. Nosy can also serve as a profiler, telling you how long the robots take to execute their tasks and complaining to them that they should work harder.

Unfortunately, many creatures wanted to enter the ToonTalk world but were deemed unfit for various reasons. Folks like Pushy the stack interface, Dicey the random number generator, and Formally the owl (the nit-picking verification engine) may be useful additions to later versions of ToonTalk, but right now we must crawl before we can walk. After we implement some state-of-the-art game (like, say, Pole Position), we can think of our future goals for introducing new life into the ToonTalk metropolis. Who knows? We may need police officers soon!

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Smiling mischievously,

-Eric