GlossaryIn this chapter you will find an explanation of most of the uncommon words that are used in the handbook.degreesDegrees are units to measure angles or turns. A full turn is 360 degrees, a half turn 180 degrees and a quarter turn 90 degrees. The commands turnleft, turnright and direction need an input in degrees.input and output of commandsSome commands take input, some commands give output, some commands take input and give output and some commands neither take input nor give output.Some examples of commands that only take input are:
forward 50
pencolour 255,0,0
print "Hello!"
The forward command takes 50 as input. forward needs this input to know how many pixels it should go forward. pencolor takes a colour as input and print takes a string (a piece of text) as input. Please note that the input can also be a container. The next example illustrates this: x = 50
print x
str = "hello!"
print str
Now some examples of commands that give output:
x = inputwindow "Please type something and press OK... thanks!"
r = random 1,100
The inputwindow command takes a string as input, and outputs the number or string that is entered. As you can see, the output of inputwindow is stored in the container x. The random command also gives output. In this case it outputs a number between 1 and 100. The output of the random is again stored in a container, named r. Note that the containers x and r are not used in the example code above.There are also commands that neither need input nor give output. Here are some examples: clear
penup
wrapon
hide
intuitive highlightingThis is a feature of &kturtle; that makes coding even easier. With intuitive highlighting the code that you write gets a colour that indicates what type of code it is. In the next list you will find the different types of code and the colour they get in the code editor.
Different types of code and their highlight colourregular commandsdark greenThe regular commands are described here.execution controllersblack (bold)The special commands control execution, read more on them here.commentsdark yellowLines that are commented start with a comment characters (#). These lines are ignored when the code is executed. Comments allow the programmer to explain a bit about his code or can be used to temporarily prevent a certain piece of code from executing.brackets [, ]light green (bold)Brackets are used to group portions of code. Brackets are often used together with execution controllers.the learn commandlight green (bold)The learn command is used to create new commands.numbersblueNumbers, well not much to say about them.stringsdark redNot much to say about (text) strings either, except that they always start and end with the double quotes (").mathematical charactersgreyThese are the mathematical characters: +, -, *, /, (, and ). Read more about them here.questions charactersblue (bold)Read more about questions here.question glue-wordspinkRead more about the question glue-words (and, or, not) here.regular textblack
pixelsA pixel is a dot on the screen. If you look very close you will see that the screen of your monitor uses pixels. All images on the screen are built with these pixels. A pixel is the smallest thing that can be drawn on the screen.A lot of commands need a number of pixels as input. These commands are: forward, backward, go, gox, goy, canvassize and penwidth.RGB combinations (colour codes)RGB combinations are used to describe colours. The R stand for red, the G stands for green and the B stands for blue. An example of an RGB combination is 255,0,0: the first value (red) is 255 and the others are 0, so this represents a bright shade of red. Each value of an RGB combination has to be in the range 0 to 255. Here a small list of some often used colours:
Often used RGB combinations0,0,0black255,255,255white255,0,0red150,0,0dark red0,255,0green0,0,255blue0,255,255light blue255,0,255pink255,255,0yellow
To easily find the RGB combinations of a colour you should try the colour picker! You can open the colour picker using ToolsColour Picker.Two commands need an RGB combination as input: these commands are canvascolour and pencolour.spriteA sprite is a small picture that can be moved around the screen. Our beloved turtle, for instance, is a sprite.Note: with this version of &kturtle; the sprite cannot be changed from a turtle into something else. Future versions of &kturtle; will be able to do this.wrappingWrapping is what happens when the turtle draws something that is to big to fix in on the canvas and wrapping is set on. This is what happens when wrapping is onAn example of wrapping When the turtle moves off a border of the canvas it is instantly taken to the opposite border so it can continue its move. This way the turtle will always stay on the screen while it moves. This happens when wrapping is on.Wrapping can be turned on and off with the wrapon and wrapoff commands. When &kturtle; starts wrapping is turned on by default.