History
Turtle graphics were added to the Logo programming language by Seymour Papert in the late 60s to support Papert's version of the turtle robot, a simple robot controlled from the user's workstation that is designed to carry out the drawing functions assigned to it using a small retractable pen set into or attached to the robot's body. Turtle geometry works somewhat differently from (x,y) addressed Cartesian geometry, being primarily vector-based (i.e. relative direction and distance from a starting point) in comparison to coordinate-addressed systems such as PostScript. As a practical matter, the use of turtle geometry instead of a more traditional model mimics the actual movement logic of the turtle robot. The turtle is traditionally and most often represented pictorially either as a triangle or a turtle icon (though it can be represented by any icon).
Papert's daughter, Artemis, has been using turtle graphics to explore the relationship between art and algorithm.
Today, Turtle graphics implementations are available for all major desktop and mobile platforms.
Read more about this topic: Turtle Graphics
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