Which game are you doing?

On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 10:28 PM, Casey Ransberger <casey.obrien.r at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi Blake. I can concur with some of your "rambling." In fact I do intend
> to do a rough translation of one of the games in the book.
>
> What's great about printed BASIC listings of games is that they tend to be
> relatively short, so they're fun to reimplement. That said, before doing an
> implementation of something, it helps to understand the original program
> very well. Arguably, the best way to understand a small program is to type
> it in, and deal with whatever bugs crop up right?
>
> I'd ideally be doing this in Squeak from the start, but I'm already into
> using an Apple IIGS emulator to get started.
>
> On Oct 1, 2014, at 11:09 AM, blake <dsblakewatson at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Heh. Those books are the "well" I go back to when learning new languages.
> (I have both in print and learned to program using them.)
>
> That said:
>
> The code in those books is truly, truly awful, by necessity, due to the
> limitations of the Basic interpreters of the time. It's easier to
> reverse-engineer the code based on the limited printouts than to figure out
> what's going on with the one-character variable names and GOTOs being the
> primary means of branching.
>
> And with THAT said:
>
> Something LIKE those books could be incredibly useful. The one thing they
> had that most environments today don't is that you could start really
> simple, get a product, and build really easily on it. The Transcript isn't
> quite up to the task, and it's a big leap from the transcript to a GUI.
>
> Rambling aside, when you think about it, it's a pretty small language you
> could build a DSL for: Variable assignment, basic math, IF-THEN, GOTO and
> RND....it's all on one page:
> http://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/showpage.php?page=i12
>
> Just have the PRINT go to a 80x25 scrolling grid. Heh. Fun!
>
>
>
>
>
>
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