Forum comments in chronological order

Anonymous
Thu 1-Aug-2019 18:33

Absolutely amazing post.

Anonymous
Mon 5-Aug-2019 00:57

Although A-C sounds correct, A-A is what is happening. The chord in question (beat 3 of bar 4) is {D, A, F, E}. A video with the sheet music can be found here, the chord is at 0:45 -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNVoZVFpW58

Anonymous
Mon 5-Aug-2019 06:09

This is a fantastic guide. As you say, it's hard to find straightforward information about how the tty system works.

Anonymous
Mon 5-Aug-2019 15:20

>Syntax errors will be found by the compiler anyway; the developers shouldn't waste time looking for them.
Actually, the syntax of every mainstream PL is so complex that you will often misinterpret a piece of code unless you parse each individual token in your head. Even a for a trivial PL with parentheses, you have to spend time rigorously parsing them as soon as the depth gets to around 3 or 4. This is because abstract data is represented in 1 dimension instead of something more natural for a human such as 2 dimensions. Convert something like (a (b (c (d e f)) (g h) (i j)))) to boxes and it becomes immediately obvious which is more readable. I've actually implemented a PL using just boxes and an editor that does operations on those boxes. In this case color actually is helpful because you can color code different types of boxes instead of decorating them differently (e.g to distinguish between a pattern match and composition operator).

>multi-line comments. If you're jumping around in a source code file, perhaps as part of an interactive search-and-replace operation, you might end up in the middle of a large block of commented-out code.
Actually, this doesn't work either. For example in Vim it's unreliable. You go to the middle of the file and the above stuff isn't colored the right way until you scroll up and then back down.

>With syntax highlighting it would be possible to mark "=" and "==" in different colours.
So we make two operators, which we claim are too hard to distinguish apart, and then make an optional editor that colors them. This doesn't seem like a good PL design to me.

Now all these problems are made an order of magnitude harder when you're trying to audit code for backdoors and underhanded code.

TL;DR PLs are horribly broken even at a level as trivial as syntax
I agree with the article though, syntax highlighting is useless or provides trivial benefits at best.

Minecrafter
Wed 14-Aug-2019 14:39

Linus, can you make a standalone emulator of your various demos like Craft?

Minecrafter
Wed 14-Aug-2019 14:40

I meant an emulator for your various demos like Craft

Anonymous
Thu 15-Aug-2019 18:33

I have published a mostly-complete conversion of Pick Up the Phone Booth and Die to Dialog.

https://github.com/jpcompton/Dialog-diversions

Please enjoy dubious code examples, make improvements, or be inspired to greater heights!

Anonymous
Tue 20-Aug-2019 06:26

I spent a little time on Autosokoban this summer vacation. I worked hard and the end result was, of course, a failure. Now I have to say that I really looked down on this problem at the beginning. I think many ordinary people may not realize the complexity of this matter as much as I did at the beginning.
Now I see your website and find that you have solved this problem perfectly more than ten years ago. Thank you, this is an impressive work.

Anonymous
Tue 20-Aug-2019 18:47

your link to dialog is pointing back to the index page instead of the dialog index page

Anonymous
Tue 20-Aug-2019 18:48

btw congratulations and well done

lft
Linus Åkesson
Wed 21-Aug-2019 06:53

Fixed. Thank you!

Anonymous
Thu 29-Aug-2019 14:59

how do you made it?

Anonymous
Thu 29-Aug-2019 23:58

Thanks for the great post!!

OldTimeAccordion
CommonCommodorist
Fri 30-Aug-2019 09:41

Hi there! Thanks for the great software and greetings from Finland!

After making my first test tune with Blackbird (yippee!) for a tongue-in-cheek C64 game project, I'm having a bit of a trouble using the win32 build of Birdcruncher to export the bb.songfile that I've made. (Pardon in advance if this is some kinda n00b error on my behalf.)

I've tried changing the options in Birdcruncher but every time I get the same error message as a result:

Filter 4, wave 3, fx 4, total 11
Crunching track and song data...
Internal stream error, 87, voice 0

I've been unable to find any references for this from the manual, and thus I'm hoping if you could help me out. If necessary, drop me an e-mail and I can send you the bb.song file in question. All help kindly appreciated. Thanks again and keep up the good work!

Skål!