[MUD-Dev] Re: let's call it a spellcraft

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On 12:47 AM 9/26/98 -0400, I personally witnessed Matthew R. Sheahan
jumping up to say:
>
>so what i'm kinda thinking of is something where maybe you have a set of
>tokens that can be permuted in a very large number of ways.  

I suddenly remember the work a friend of mine did in a CS class. Being a
silly sort of person, when he was told to write a compiler for a
proprietary language he wrote one that was entirely context based and
consisted of the four tokens diddy, dum, wah, and doo. Needless to say, he
led off the example program with "doo wah diddy diddy dum diddy doo" and
proceeded to go through the most outrageously hilarious acrobatics with
these words, which in turn would translate cleanly into assembler and
assemble perfectly into a .COM file. As he put it, "It's a language you'd
sooner die than work in, but at least you'd die laughing." 

I wish I still had the language description; it was outrageously
complicated, and included things like (this isn't an actual quote, but it's
similar to the sort of thing he documented) "A diddy is treated as a wah
unless it is immediately preceded by a doo and followed by another diddy
(except when preceded by 'doo doo' which will be covered later); in that
case it operates on the next dum token, provided said dum token is not
bracketed by doos or modified by diddys, in which case it is just plain dum."

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Caliban Tiresias Darklock <caliban at darklock.com>   | "I'm not sorry or 
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