Re: Scheme (was Re: Limitations of Inform and TADS?)


8 Nov 1995 07:19:23 GMT

> Could I bother somebody to tell me a little bit about Scheme and why it
> would be better for writing IF games than other languages? As a
> non-computer-programmer, I know about languages like LISP and Pascal, but
> I've never heard of Scheme. (I've heard of Prolog, but I don't know
> anything about it.)

Scheme is a dialect of Lisp, of little enough importance, but used widely as a
scripting language, for many of the same reasons one might base an adventure
game language on it.

* It is _very_ simple.

Indeed, in many introductory computer science courses, students implement
Scheme compilers and interpreters. Writing portable interpreters for
scheme is easy. Scheme to C converters exist.

* It is _very_ extensible.

Scheme is probably the easiest language in existance to add powerful
constructs and intuitive syntax to. It would be possible to add
adventure-game-specific elements to Scheme without in any way
modifying the underlying language.

It does have a variety of drawbacks. There is not really an accepted standard
for Scheme (though the R4 manual comes close). Being so simple, it has no
static type-checking, and (in its bare-bones versions) no aspects of
object-oriented programming. Indeed, here at MIT in the introductory computer
science class, one homework (the introduction to o-o programming) is to add an
adventure-game package to Scheme. Anyone who thought the adventure-game
writing contest on the net recently was the first is wrong by at least 10
years- 350 people participate in one every year here, with some fantastic
results (though not obviously, ones capable of being played widely, given that
the participants have about a week to get their assignment done).

Carl de Marcken