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 Nilsson in restructuring some particularly grotty gotos is
-gratefully acknowledged.
+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 the
FORTRAN-derived code that formerly implemented the save/restore
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 ==
The 2.5 code was a mechanical C translation of a FORTRAN original.
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 comprehensive test suite that we built first and verified
-with coverage tools (we have 88% coverage, with the remaining 12%
+with coverage tools (we have over 90% coverage, with the remaining
confined to exception cases that are difficult to reach). This is
what you are running when you do "make check".
and the choice to refrain will make forward translation into future
languages easier.
-* There are a few gotos left that resist restructuring; all of these
- are in the principal command interpreter function implementing its
- state machine.
+* There are a few gotos left that resist restructuring; all are in the
+ principal command interpreter function implementing its state
+ machine.
* Linked lists (for objects at a location) are implemented using an array
of link indices. This is a surviving FORTRANism that is quite unlike
to fix it because doing so would (a) be quite difficult, and (b)
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.
-
* 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.