Drawing the Koch Curve and Koch Snowflake with ASCII Art and C Language

The Koch curve is a simple fractal introduced by Helge von Koch in 1904; by repeatedly subdividing a line segment and inserting an equilateral triangle, the curve’s length becomes infinite.

Three such curves rotated by 120° form the Koch snowflake.

Using only four ASCII characters (/, \, _, and space) the fractal can be drawn at various recursion depths, as illustrated for n=0, 1, 2, and 3.

A C program implements the drawing by maintaining a character buffer image of size w*h, defining a coordinate system where x increases to the right and y downwards, and providing a Put function to write characters.

The recursive function KochCurve(int n, int dir) draws an n‑order segment by calling itself four times with appropriate directions; when n reaches 0 it draws a single line segment according to the direction.

The main function allocates the buffer, iterates over desired orders, calls KochCurve , and prints the buffer, first for a single curve and then for the full snowflake by invoking the curve three times with directions 0, 2, and 4.

The article concludes that fractal graphics can be generated with very simple definitions and suggests extensions such as variant curve families, bounding‑box culling for performance, or alternative drawing frameworks.