*BSD News Article 51651


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From: badger@phylo.life.uiuc.edu (Jonathan Badger)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,rec.games.int-fiction,comp.unix.bsd.misc
Subject: Re: xyzzy
Date: 20 Sep 95 00:25:37 GMT
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
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jawells@crl.com (Jason A. Wells) writes:


>	To my knowledge, when Zork was first released, Infocom boasted
>that their command handling, complex puzzles, and such could not be
>handled in FORTRAN.  Which caused DECUS (DEC Users Society) develop Dungeon
>to prove Infocom wrong.  DECUS apparently did a nice job (never played it,
>myself) however Dungeon is said to fall short in its command handling.


Yes and no. True, the Fortran version of Zork (a.k.a. Dungeon) was
written after Infocom published the split up Zork trilogy for micros,
but Zork (the unsplit version) had been floating around academia in
its' original MDL (a Lisp variant) version a few years before Zork was
a commercial product. I'm also not aware of any boast concerning
feasability in FORTRAN. I believe it was re-written in FORTRAN by
DECUS to make it more portable, as MDL never was a widely used
language. I'm not sure when the unsplit version of "Zork" was renamed
"Dungeon" -- at the time of the FORTRAN conversion?

>	The source is available in FORTRAN (Don't know which version/flavor)
>on ftp.gmd.de in the /if-archive/games/sources directory (I think).

Versions written in C and TADS (a specialized language for writing
adventure games) are also available on ftp.gmd.de