[Simh] Crowther's Adventure game

[Larry Baker]

Bob,

Fortran—especially of that era—is a simple language.  It wasn't clear to me what the end goal was of the conversation.  Starting with old DEC-10 code and trying to get it to run on Linux?  Anyway, none of the Fortran code that was posted here was difficult at all to understand.  Of course, I know it from being proficient in Fortran for decades.  But, a slight but of Google'ing would have easily solved any porting problems.  File formats being exchanged across different platforms is another issue.  And, language independent.  I'm sure you know that RMS file formats are far richer and expressive of their content than a non-descriptive stream of bytes.  Oh, except for the magic 16-bits at the front of something executable.  Or the suffix that help you infer the semantics.  A file system with limited metadata forces such hacks.

Larry Baker
US Geological Survey
650-329-5608
baker at usgs.gov



> On 2 Feb 2018, at 8:18:31 PM, simh-request at trailing-edge.com wrote:
> 
> Message: 4
> Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2018 22:18:23 -0600
> From: Bob Nelson <rmkrider at gmail.com <mailto:rmkrider at gmail.com>>
> To: Kevin Handy <khandy21yo at gmail.com <mailto:khandy21yo at gmail.com>>
> Cc: Carey Tyler Schug <sqrfolkdnc at comcast.net <mailto:sqrfolkdnc at comcast.net>>, Simh
> 	<simh at trailing-edge.com <mailto:simh at trailing-edge.com>>
> Subject: Re: [Simh] Crowther's Adventure game
> Message-ID: <13523F5C-6C01-4765-B545-66D7C0FCE5C9 at gmail.com <mailto:13523F5C-6C01-4765-B545-66D7C0FCE5C9 at gmail.com>>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
> 
> The Fortran version of Adventure may be the most authentic but if you don't want to deal with building 'ancient' code on a language few are proficient in now there are better options.  Last year Eric Raymond (The Cathedral And The Bazaar guy) and a few others took the ugly machine translated C code from the last known Fortran version and rewrote/structured it into something that is much more readable and maintainable.  Complete with automated testing and code coverage metrics to make sure the game play was not changed.  The code is on github and can also be found here:
> http://www.catb.org/esr/open-adventure/ <http://www.catb.org/esr/open-adventure/>
> Eric wrote several entries about the rewrite in his blog.
> 
> Bob Nelson

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