taradinoc

6 ms·

1.
by taradinoc 10mo ago
The MDL bumper sticker, "my other 1 is a REST", just doesn't have the same ring to it.
2.
by taradinoc 10mo ago
A C-based alternative for compiling ZIL? I don't believe there's one that works. The two options for compiling ZIL code are to run ZILF on a modern system or to run ZILCH on a PDP-10 emulator. The good news is you don't need
3.
by taradinoc 10mo ago
Right - that's because ZIL was more or less a _superset_ of MDL. ZILCH (Infocom's compiler) provided all the functions of MDL, _plus_ a bunch of new ones that manipulated data structures which were then used to generate assembly c
4.
by taradinoc 10mo ago
Author of ZILF here. I wouldn't say that ZIL "does not have support for custom macros", because ZIL never existed in a form independent of MDL. There's no such thing as "MDL macros that were not available in ZIL&quo
5.
by taradinoc 7y ago
>If allowing a particular person to visit means several others will refrain from visiting, is it then a good idea to permit that? That's a value judgement for the organizers to make. That's part of it, but it's also a valu
6.
by taradinoc 7y ago
I'd worry that the doctor might recommend dangerous and ineffective treatments, that the police officers would arrest me on false pretenses, and that the cleaner would steal my belongings and poison my groceries. So, yeah, I'd fir
7.
by taradinoc 7y ago
Yes, goog-anon is doing candidates -- and the lawyers in Wilberg v. Google -- a huge favor by admitting on the record that there's explicit racial bias in their hiring process.
8.
by taradinoc 7y ago
> Because college is where women are driven out of computer science, by behavior from professors and peers. A lot of people take that for granted based on anecdotes, but actual data is elusive. Some things we should expect to see if this
9.
by taradinoc 7y ago
> If you're self-taught you have to be willing to learn things you find completely uninteresting (or boring, hard, whatever) if you want to be as well-rounded as a CS graduate. Not necessarily, you could also just find all that CS
10.
by taradinoc 7y ago
Interesting. I did find an implementation of backquoting in MDL, kind of: https://github.com/PDP-10/muddle/blob/master/mim/development... It doesn't run on any available MDL implementation, bec
11.
by taradinoc 7y ago
Do you like this?
12.
by taradinoc 7y ago
>Quasiquotation pretty much doesn't need to exist because of the ! sequence "operator" for splicing lists into lists and forms. Hmm... I guess I don't know everything quasiquoting is used for in Lisp, but in MDL and Z
13.
by taradinoc 7y ago
>When IF focuses on prose, and doesn't contain puzzles, it's harder to actually call it a game. This debate has been going on for decades. (See Photopia.)
14.
by taradinoc 7y ago
Yeah, if there's nothing after the final !- in an atom, it means the atom is in <ROOT>. (See section 15.5 in the manual.) I'm not sure what the purpose of things like <RETURN!-> and <ORB!-> is. It could have some
15.
by taradinoc 7y ago
Angle brackets and parentheses are just two of the many flavors of brackets you'll find in MDL. First, you got your regular, "boring" brackets: <SETG X 0> ;FORM (NORD BERT) ;LIST [1 MONEY 2 SH
16.
by taradinoc 7y ago
Yes, it's a cruel twist of fate that all this news about Infocom's ZIL is happening shortly after the launch of a cryptocurrency called "ZIL", in the same month as a conference called "Infocom". Twitter search
17.
by taradinoc 7y ago
Function definitions normally go in the GVAL, so <DEFINE FOO () ...> is equivalent to <SETG FOO <FUNCTION () ...>> But EVAL will fall back to the LVAL if the atom doesn't have a GVAL. In other words:
18.
by taradinoc 7y ago
This is described in glorious high-definition ASCII art in Appendix 1 of The MDL Programming Language : https://github.com/taradinoc/mdl-docs/blob/master/docs/appen...
19.
by taradinoc 7y ago
Everything you said about I7 is true, but its real value comes from the abstractions it introduces. That is, it isn't just an English-like syntax for writers who are used to writing in complete sentences... it's a programming mode
20.
by taradinoc 7y ago
Hmm, which evaluation and splicing markers is it referring to? MDL doesn't have quasiquoting, but it has "segments" that expanded while evaluating a structure (prefix a form with "!", and the result is spliced into
21.
by taradinoc 7y ago
Yeah, MDL used the question mark suffix like Lisp used "p".
22.
by taradinoc 7y ago
Here's a ZIL version of the game where "xyzzy" and "plugh" first appeared: https://bitbucket.org/jmcgrew/zilf/src/tip/Examples/advent/a...
23.
by taradinoc 7y ago
It's defined in verbs.zil. https://github.com/historicalsource/hitchhikersguide/blob/d7...
24.
by taradinoc 7y ago
Who is that handsome mystery developer, where did he come from, and why can't we get enough of him?
25.
by taradinoc 7y ago
Not functional? Warnings aren't errors. Maybe it's just better at catching potential bugs...
26.
by taradinoc 7y ago
MDL and Lisp kinda co-evolved, and some MDL features (lambda lists, maybe others?) made it into the evolutionary branch that lived.
27.
by taradinoc 11y ago
If you enjoy reading about the Zork Implementation Language, you might also enjoy my project, ZILF, which is a working implementation of ZIL: https://sourceforge.net/projects/zilf/ ZIL is basically a domain-specif