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Date: Sat, 28 Sep 2002 10:10:13 -0400
From: John Colagioia <JColagioia@csi.com>
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Subject: Re: Inform: Game Banner
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Al wrote:
> Roger Firth wrote:
>>2. No, I don't know. The DM4 has 80 pages of answers to exercises;
>>that's on top of the examples which illuminate almost every page.
>>Whatever it may be lacking, it ain't examples.
> Yeah but it still isn't a real good example of a tutorial like the IBG is.

And it wasn't meant to be, though early chapters do a decent job of
getting the new programmer started.

>>Nor does it lack an index. Two entries for Banner (library routine):
>>p.152 tells you that, if your Initialise() returns 2, "the game banner
>>is suppressed for now"; p.419 mentions suppressing the banner
>>at the Initialise stage (and Initialise on p. 432 talks about a return
>>value of 2 to suppress the game banner).
> For those of us who don't  fully understand return values
> yet, that doesn't really cut it.

One *might* think that the discussion of return values (which the
index claims lives on page 16, with the return statement supposedly
appearing on page 18) would clarify this.

Alternatively, if the budding Inform programmer had used just about
any other programming language, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch
to guess how to return a value.

> Sorry but Graham wrote the thing
> as if he were teaching himself so it seems. Not to be critial but
> a lot of newbies are going to have problems.

How are you reading the DM4?  Section 1 seems very tutorial-like to
me, though it's somewhat more language-oriented than task-oriented.

> I'm still studying how Emily did certain things for  my game.

Why would you do that?  To be blunt, it's taken Ms. Short quite some
time to figure out the details she wants.  To try to assimilate them
before learning about (say) return values is just setting yourself
up for failure.

As they say, you can't run before you learn to crawl.

> and BTW she told me that she's been working with Inform
> for 2 years before she felt proficient enojght to REALLY start
> turning out here own games if I understood her correctly.

I think you understood her words, but (and I'm going *way* out on a
limb, here) not necessarily her entire intent.  It took her two years
to develop what she intended as proficiency--that is, two years to be
able to develop the games she wrote.

But look at those games!  There's probably enough programming tricks
and physics comprehension in some of them to fill a college-level
course.  That's not a starting point.

> As I said in a earlier post: THIS AIN'T YOUR FATHER'S
> IMPLEMENTING LANGUAGE.

Given that it reflects a history of the thirty-year-old Z-Machine,
thirty-odd-year-old C, and twenty-odd-year-old BASIC, I'd probably
argue this statement, if I really had the patience...

But, then, you'd probably (rightfully) point out that my father spent
most of the last thirty years owning a hot dog stand, and never
actually programmed, so you are literally correct...

> IT'S VERY COMPLICATED ! ! !

Please read the first section of the DM4.  It'll provide the
groundwork on which everything else you read is based.  If you've
ever done any programming, most of it will seem very familiar to
you, which will speed the process.

>>So, as far as I can see, the DM4 provides a perfectly good
>>explanation of how to suppress the banner, and Jim summarised
>>that above when he wrote "Return 2 from Initialise()".
>>The answers are mostly all there. Whether people both to read them
>>carefully (or indeed at all) is another matter.
>  If I had to post a question to something this"simple" then others newcomers are
> gointg to have the same problems.

And...uhm...they'll also be told to look it up in the index.  Which
isn't nearly the waste of effort it seems.  People should know about
indices and how to use them for basic research.  For one thing, it
means not having to wait for people to answer you.

> Once again the DM4 is NOT a tutorial.

It was not intended as such, though many people have successfully
used it that way.

> The IBG should have been
> written concurrently along with it. NOT  more than a year later.

Well, we'll just have to take Roger and Sonja out back and have them
beaten for not being prepared for the DM4.  I mean, heavens, Roger
and Graham even live in the same *country*!  They're all but joined
at the hip...

> IMHO the IBG will be more useful as a teaching device and the DM4
> will be the structural skeleton of the makeup of the language.

I'm again going to go out on a limb and suggest that the IBG won't be
a teaching device.  I teach on occasion.  Sometimes, I even teach
Inform.  I won't be reading out of it to any class, though.  It might
be a useful *learning* device, though, as a supplement to the DM4 (as
it says, if I remember correctly, in the IBG, itself).

