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 game; Jason signed on early in the process to help. The assistance
+of Peje Nilson in restructuring some particularly grotty gotos is
+gratefully acknowledged.
== Nomenclature ==
coverage tools. This is what you are running when you do "make check".
This move entailed some structural changes. The most important was
-the refactoring of 354 gotos into if/loop/break structures. We
+the refactoring of over 350 gotos into if/loop/break structures. We
also abolished almost all shared globals; the main one left is a
struct holding the game's saveable/restorable state.
abstraction, but this is one of the rare cases in which they are
an obvious improvement over what they're displacing...
-The code falls a short of being fully modern C in the following
+The code falls short of being fully modern C in the following
ways:
* We have not attempted to translate the old code to pointer-based
and the choice to refrain will make forward translation into future
languages easier.
-* There are 20 gotos left that resist restructuring; all but one of
- these are in the principal command interpreter function implementing
- its state machine. A 21st, a two-level loop breakout, is not reducible
- even in principle.
+* There are a few gotos left that resist restructuring; all of these
+ 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
compromise forward-portability to other languages.
* The code still has an unfortunately high density of magic numbers - in
- particular, numeric object and room IDs.
+ particular, numeric object and room IDs. There are plans to fix this.
+
+* Much of the code still uses FORTRAN-style uppercase names.
* The code is still mostly typeless, slinging around machine longs
like a FORTRAN or BCPL program. Some (incomplete) effort has been made