[Simh] Muddle compilers? ( was: RE: Crowther's Adventure game)

[Jason Self]

Tim Stark <fsword007 at gmail.com> wrote ..
> I found Muddle in PDP10 project (Github) but still empty repo.
> Does anyone plan to put them on yet?  I am looking for Muddle
> compilers in long time.

I have also been looking. About two years ago Rich Alderson said, on
this mailing list [0]: "Somewhere in my collection of stuff I
probably still have a tape of the source for MDL v105"
"I'll probably have time to look into it after I retire--in 2021.
Before then is questionable."

I have also been talking people to try to find copies, including for
example the folks from Infocom.

My understanding is that version 105 was the last mainframe version
of Muddle, before it was later ported to Apollo/Domain workstations,
the VAX via BSD UNIX either 4.2 or 4.3 as well as A/UX on the
Macintosh II. To my knowledge none of this has survived to the
present day.

That means Rich Alderson is probably the last hope to be able to find
anything at all, assuming that he has time to search for it and
assuming that he is able to find it, and assuming that it can be
read if it is found.

> I found muddle manuals and specs but not software yet. There is
> confusion software to interpret Muddle sources on If-archive ftp
> site.

Yes. Confusion implemented a reduced subset without the more
interesting features. I'm involved in a project to develop a Muddle  
interpreter [1], but it doesn't target the PDP-10. The plan is 
implement it all: Processes, coroutines, the package manager... 
everything. It recently gained the ability to run real SUBRs.

[0]
http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/pipermail/simh/2016-February/015040.html
[1] https://muddlers.org/