Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Path: gmd.de!Germany.EU.net!mcsun!sunic!liuida!d88hanpe
From: d88hanpe@odalix.ida.liu.se (Hans Persson)
Subject: Re: Design of a New Language: 2
Message-ID: <1993Nov13.095338.2246@ida.liu.se>
Sender: news@ida.liu.se
Organization: CIS Dept, Univ of Linkoping, Sweden
References: <CG96Mq.1xs@cantua.canterbury.ac.nz>) <2bqtv5INN81f@life.ai.mit.edu>
Date: Sat, 13 Nov 1993 09:53:38 GMT
Lines: 39

dmb@min.ai.mit.edu (David Baggett) writes:
>In the 16 years I've been programming I don't think I've ever seen better
>documented code than adv.t, except perhaps for Knuth's TeX and Metafont
>source (which were published as books).  There are more comments than
>source lines in adv.t!  Even without the manual you can figure out what's
>going on.

>Furthermore, I think the TADS manual is really good.  There are BUGS in
>adv.t that cause problems (try "remove x-ray specs" instead of "take off
>specs" in UU2), but I don't really see how most of the classes could be any
>*better* documented.

Well, yes and no. When we started to write Enhanced we had a copy of
TADS 2.1 and hadn't registered since we didn't at that point know if
it was any good. We learnt most of the features of the languages by
looking through how things were done in adv.t (and ditch.t, the sample
game that is included in the package). In this respect, the
documentation is very good since you can learn all the basics without
even looking in the manual. The problem is that if you try to do a
little more complicated stuff, there is suddenly no documentation at
all. The more basic something is, the less it seems to be supposed to
be modified or even understood by the user and it gets progressively
less documentation. I have mucked around quite a bit with the handling
of light/dark and what is reachable or not and the documentation of
those things leave things to be wished for -- not only in adv.t but
also in the manual.

An irritation at this point is that the latest version of TADS I have
found have had something very weird done to the comments in adv.t
rendering them almost unreadable. I suppose that they are marked up so
that they will print nicer but on my screen they look so bad that I
don't bother with them but read the code instead.

/ Hans
--
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
! Hans Persson / The Pink Unicorn                  SophistiChaos Game Design !
! unicorn@lysator.liu.se, d88hanpe@und.ida.liu.se                            !
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