andybest

Yars' Revenge on the Atari 2600 used the game code as random input to generate the graphics for the 'safe zone'

Interesting, I wasn't aware of the #line directive, thanks!

Yes, you would need to keep track of the source locations for each node in the AST. There is a nice example in the LLVM Kaleidoscope tutorial here: https://llvm.org/docs/tutorial/LangImpl09.html

Will be interesting to see how compiling to C affects debugging in the real world. LLVM is nice as a target, since it allows you to map generated IR blocks to source locations. Of course, it also means that the compiler needs to link to all of the LLVM libs, which is a bit of a hassle too. (I've found this when working on a Clojure->LLVM compiler bootstrapped from Clojure).

I haven't done any performance comparisons yet, unfortunately. I'm still working on improving the codebase to make it more Swifty. The backing fields are a leftover from the original Java implementation, and I didn't want to change too much initially, but now I have a bunch of tests and am using it in another project (a PDF generation library), I will start to make these changes :)

I'm actually unsure how it works when making a derivative work like this, because the license has the following statement: "Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer." Surely changing the name in the conditions would technically be changing the conditions themselves? Maybe I'm just worrying too much ;)

Yes they do, collecting them enables you to turn into Super Sonic (in Sonic 2+)

It's probably because those apps haven't implemented state restoration properly. Basically, the OS reserves the right to terminate your app at any point when it is in the background, and it is the job of the app to restore the state back to where it was. iOS provides hooks and a serialisation mechanism for the app, to make it easier.

I have also tried to teach people how to code, though mostly in the context of them needing to do it in order to complete a specific project. I've found that unless they are motivated to learn from the ground up, they won't tend to have much understanding of what you're telling them, and at best will be able to copy/paste snippets. I've found that it's actually surprisingly hard to get across simple concepts like variables without starting from basics.

I remember trying to research things on the web before the days of Google and Wikipedia- it was much easier to go to the library back then, in my experience. The ways that these tools have changed the ways that people work is astounding

That must have been frustrating to say the least. I have many memories of transporting essays to school on a floppy, only to have it be corrupted by the time I got there.

I wonder if a more efficient microcode could be written for the Alto to optimise just for rendering Mandelbrot sets