Re: A case for HTML as a programming language

From: Arthur J. O'Dwyer (ajo_at_nospam.andrew.cmu.edu)
Date: 11/11/04 

Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2004 18:22:13 -0500 (EST)

On Wed, 10 Nov 2004, Randy Howard wrote:
> tgm2tothe10thpower@replacetextwithnumber.hotmail.com says...
>> Michael Mendelsohn coughed up:
>>> Casey Hawthorne schrieb:
>>>> Looping? Recursion?
>>>
>>> "You're in maze of twisty passages, all alike."
>>
>> Plugh or xyzzy, take your pick.
>
> That was in a different location, and I think it was "plgh"
> not "plugh" was it not? (It was on the Heathkit H-89
> implementation for HDOS anyway).
>
> To get out of the maze, it was N,D,D,D.

   That sounds way too simple for Colossal Cave; besides, you need to
get the treasure chest. (Not in the H-89 version, maybe, but in the
"extended" version. :) It was "plugh," but in a different location;
and "xyzzy" was in a different location too. (So was "plover." ;)
The only way to get out of this twisty maze was to go "back" from the
entrance or slide down the column, IIRC.

   Back on topic, sort of, last summer I got about halfway through
writing an adaptation of Colossal Cave in Perl CGI. It's one big
CGI program, which generates an HTML page describing the current room
in which various words are linked to other rooms' pages. Inventory
and state information is tracked in the CGI parameter string. It
got boring after a while, and I let the free-CGI-hosting account
I was using to test it expire. The magic words are tricky to preserve
in HTML. ;)

-Arthur,
noside samoht

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