Re:Lists and Lists (1996)
by sde on Sunday December 14, 2014 @04:38AM
(#8747859)
The only verbs I found on my own were 'help' 'info' 'I' 'exit' and 'quit', which all cause it to do useless or nonsensical things, including 'quit' which apparently caused it to finish the game. Game finished successfully, in one page. I completely don't get why people would want to spend time guessing what 'verbs' a command line interpreter recognizes. It's also very bad because when it does 'recognize' a verb, it doesn't take it as a command for it to do something, but seems to reinterpret it as having some ungrammatical relation to a fictional story.
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There was a help link in the top right corner that was a pdf showing all the verbs.
I know. I saw that link and viewed it. I listed what verbs I figured out on my own (found within the game or guessed) as a comment on what the whole user experience of the game was like. It left me feeling like avoiding Lisp, even after I tried again and--only because of getting tips from the comments here--got into the Lisp interpreter part. It was still a frustrating guessing game with no point.
You are correct, but I don't know that the author is interested in fixing it, since the web page was published so long ago that the author could have since had a child who is now capable of writing something like
http://learnlispthehardway.org/try-lisp/
that is accessible to modern humans.
That seems better. However, the return values were almost too dark to read while there's daylight, and I got only eight commands into it before I found an error. (mod -3 5) returns -3. I don't know if that error is just in this implementation, or in many versions of Common Lisp, but a quick search shows there are versions of Common Lisp where mod is implemented correctly. (In mathematics, -3 = 2 modulo 5, or equivalently (-3 mod 5) = 2. Even Python knows that -3 % 5 == 2, where '%' is Python's modulus operator.)