Xref: utzoo rec.games.programmer:819 comp.lang.forth:870
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!pacbell!sactoh0!tree!stever
From: stever@tree.UUCP (Steve Rudek)
Newsgroups: rec.games.programmer,comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: Interactive Adventure Writting Language
Summary: Use FORTH or LISP & make it multiuser
	 Investigate _Adventure_Authoring_Language (AAL) by Jon Amsterdam
Message-ID: <267@tree.UUCP>
Date: 15 Apr 89 04:17:07 GMT
References: <39514@vax1.tcd.ie>
Organization: TREE BBS (916)-349-0385 Sacramento, Ca
Lines: 52

In article <39514@vax1.tcd.ie>, trolfs@vax1.tcd.ie (Tommy) writes:
>   I'm in the initial stages of considering writting an *Interactive
> Adventure Writting Language*. My motivation for doing this is the
> language FORTH and my love of text adventures.

If you are a serious programmer and competent to do what you are proposing
(i.e., design and follow through with the coding of a new language) then I
would be very interested in participating in this project.

I agree with you that interactive languages beat the pants off of compiled
languages (unless you have one of Borland's "Turbo" products in which case
the distinction becomes moot).  Although I'm not a FORTH expert I've used
it enough to know that it would be a good choice.  But I don't know
of a decent public domain FORTH for UNIX--do you?  Does anyone?  cforth
isn't even worth considering--it's incomplete and too low quality.  I'm
assuming, of course, that you'd be developing this adventure language on
and for UNIX?  There are enough adventure languages which do NOT support
concurrent multiple users; if you want to make this language really something
special then multiuser should be #1 in the specification.

By the way, someone mentioned AdvSys--I believe AdvSys is written by the
same guy who wrote XLISP.  Don't these prolific programmers turn you green?
Unfortunately AdvSys doesn't appear to be anywhere near as powerful as,
say, ADL.  Or am I mistaken??

Have you (or anyone) seen a language called Adventure Authoring Language
(AAL) by Jonathan Amsterdam at MIT?  The author describes this language in
"Creating an Adventurous Language" in the April 1988 issue of Dr. Dobb's
Journal.  AAL is written in and resides atop a Common LISP kernel just as
your proposed language would reside atop FORTH.  The author comments on how
this enables him to always fall back to LISP code if doing someting in AAL
is too difficult.  I've been thinking for some time that it might be
possible to implement AAL in XLISP in which case the entire package
would be pretty portable and freely distributable (at least I *think*
AAL is public domain).  However, I don't know LISP and have been using that
as a convenient excuse for postponing investigating AAL.  Perhaps, though,
it would make more sense to enhance AAL then to start from scratch?

Then again, if it is the excitement of writing the adventurous language
which primarily interests you then investigating AAL is probably the last
thing you want to do. :-)

P.S.  As long as I've got the floor, does anyone know of a good concurrent
multiuser adventure game for System V UNIX?  The closest I've seen is
phantasia but its player interaction is minimal. Surely there is something
better available?  Especially with System V "shared memory" interplayer
communications can't be that difficult to implement. (Yeah, I know--then 
why don't I shut up and implement it myself.  Yeah!  Guess I will!  I've
got a couple hours until bedtime! :-)
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