What can I do with Leonardo ?

Leonardo is an integrated environment for program development and software visualization. It includes several modules such as an ANSI C compiler, a text editor, a graph editor, and a virtual machine to run programs and view animations. You can use these modules separately, or together according to your necessities.

With Leonardo you can do the following:

• teach and understand a large variety classical algorithms
• edit graphs
• edit, compile, run and debug C programs
• create your own animations

Leonardo is provided with several examples of program animations that you may simply want to enjoy. These examples range from the implementation of classical algorithms (sorting algorithms, graph algorithms etc.) to graphical demos and even games such as Tetris and Checkers.

What do I need to know to use Leonardo ?

It depends on your necessities:

• nothing is required from you if you simply want to run the built-in examples.
• if you want to build and execute your own programs with Leonardo you should know the ANSI C programming language.
• if you want to visualize your own programs by adding animated views with text and graphics, you should learn a simple programming language called ALPHA. Don't worry ! As you will see, you can easily learn ALPHA by copying and pasting pieces of code from examples throughout this book and trying to see what they produce.