Viewing profile — taradinoc

The MDL bumper sticker, "my other 1 is a REST", just doesn't have the same ring to it.

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-…

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 stru…

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…

>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 mak…

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 bel…

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.

> 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 dat…

> 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…

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 implem…

Do you like this?

>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 …

>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.)

Yeah, if there's nothing after the final !- in an atom, it means the atom is in . (See section 15.5 in the manual.) I'm not sure what the purpose of things like and is. It could ha…

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: ;FORM (NORD BERT) ;LIST [1 MONEY 2 S…

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 cal…

Function definitions normally go in the GVAL, so is equivalent to > But EVAL will fall back to the LVAL if the atom doesn't have a GVAL. In other words: is equivalent to ,A) ( .A) …

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...

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 writin…

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 "…

Yeah, MDL used the question mark suffix like Lisp used "p".

Here's a ZIL version of the game where "xyzzy" and "plugh" first appeared: https://bitbucket.org/jmcgrew/zilf/src/tip/Examples/advent/a...

It's defined in verbs.zil. https://github.com/historicalsource/hitchhikersguide/blob/d7...

Who is that handsome mystery developer, where did he come from, and why can't we get enough of him?

Not functional? Warnings aren't errors. Maybe it's just better at catching potential bugs...