Parser Integrity

True - and possibly for the same reasons. Written abbreviations for directions would be expected to work in both contexts for the same reason.

Klingon should be easy since, IIRC, it has the same unambiguous syntax as Lojban (or Loglan?). (Too bad Lojban isn’t semantically unambiguous. “le blanu botpi” means (ignoring possibilities for tense and number) “the bottle which is associated in some way with blueness”.)
I like that Gostak. It reminds me of Stanislaw Lem’s story ‘Trurl’s Electronic Bard’.
Mockles! Fent on silpen tree.
Mockles! Three a-feening!
Mockles, what begong to thee
in thy pantry dreaming?
:slight_smile:

1 Like

Tell me about it! After I’ve been playing Nethack for a while, my touch-typing tends to be gibberish! (Nt tyiybgg ttoubg tebds ti be gubberubg.)
(I never use vi. shudder Emacs for me!)

I have books on emacs: talk about feature bloat.

I never use emacs. (shudder) Vi for me!

The old vi vs. emacs wars. :wink:

PS. An old professor that taught a c/Unix course I attended sometime in the last century forced us to try vi and I have been a fan ever since.

You don’t have to use every feature(!) but I regularly discover that there’s an easier way in Emacs of doing what I’ve been doing (and I occasionally write ELisp to do something, e.g., sorting the weirdly-formatted notes I make while playing Nethack).

Now, that’s just mental cruelty :smiley:

1 Like

Pleaaaassseeee… NOT again the vi vs emacs flame !!!

Concerned regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

2 Likes

Well it used to be tiresome and distracting.
But kids these days don’t even seem to care.

Why not, it’ll be just like the old times :wink:

1 Like

I’m probably the oldest timer here. :wink:

FWIW, Emacs is steadily getting worse. cut-and-paste is under attack (obviously). my version sometimes won’t quit, and it’s always been annoying that X and C are next to each other. That’s really dumb.

1 Like

In my experience, ‘n’ can be short for both ‘north’ and ‘no’ depending on the situation.

When the standard prompt is shown (‘what now,’ what next’ or similar) ‘n’ would be interpreted as ‘go north’. When a question is asked of the player - such as “Do you really want to quit (y/n)?” - then ‘n’ would be interpreted as ‘no’.

Displaying ‘(y/n)’ makes it clearer what input is expected in these special cases.

3 Likes

Yes, I think that’s a good technique, to change the prompt dynamically.
In a web form the placeholder attribute does that very well.

1 Like