The principal maintainers of this code are Eric S. Raymond and Jason
Ninneman. Eric received Don Woods's encouragement to update and ship
the game; Jason signed on early in the process to help. The assistance
-of Peje Nilson in restructuring some particularly grotty gotos is
-gratefully acknowledged.
+of Peje Nilsson in restructuring some particularly grotty gotos is
+gratefully acknowledged. Petr Voropaev contributed fuzz testing.
== Nomenclature ==
The adventure.text file is no longer required at runtime. Instead, it
is compiled at build time to a source module containing C structures,
-which is then linked to the advent binary.
+which is then linked to the advent binary. There is an adventure.yaml file
+as well; this is also compiled to C code, and will eventually replace
+adventure.text altogether.
-The game-save format has changed. This was done to simplify
-FORTRAN-derived code that formerly implemented these functions;
-without C's fread(3)/fwrite() and structs it was necessarily pretty
-ugly by modern standards. Encryption and checksumming have been
-discarded - it's pointless to try tamper-proofing saves when everyone
-has the source code.
+The game-save format has changed. This was done to simplify the
+FORTRAN-derived code that formerly implemented the save/restore
+functions; without C's fread(3)/fwrite() and structs it was
+necessarily pretty ugly by modern standards. Encryption and
+checksumming have been discarded - it's pointless to try
+tamper-proofing saves when everyone has the source code.
+
+A -r command-line been added. When it is given (with a file
+path argument) it is functionally equivalent to RESTORE command.
== Translation ==
Jason Ninneman and I have moved it to what is almost, but not quite,
idiomatic modern C. We refactored the right way, checking correctness
-against a comprehesive test suite that we built first and verified with
-coverage tools. This is what you are running when you do "make check".
+against a comprehensive test suite that we built first and verified
+with coverage tools (we have 88% coverage, with the remaining 12%
+confined to exception cases that are difficult to reach). This is
+what you are running when you do "make check".
This move entailed some structural changes. The most important was
the refactoring of over 350 gotos into if/loop/break structures. We
compromise forward-portability to other languages.
* The code still has an unfortunately high density of magic numbers - in
- particular, numeric object and room IDs. There are plans to fix this.
+ particular, numeric object IDs. There are plans to fix this.
* Much of the code still uses FORTRAN-style uppercase names.
+* The code still assumes one-origin array indexing. Thus, arrays are
+ a cell larger than they strictly need to be and cell 0 is unused.
+
* The code is still mostly typeless, slinging around machine longs
like a FORTRAN or BCPL program. Some (incomplete) effort has been made
to introduce semantic types.