SedSokoban

rsd writes: "Have you ever thought that sed is too limited and only useful to Regular Expression scripts? Well, verde666, who works for Conectiva, proved that it can be used for games too. He wrote a sokoban game named sedsokoban with sed. There is even a screenshot."

Comments

Ummm....What?

[Tranvisor]

First of all what is sed? Sorry for being late to the party here, but come on, I have no idea what this is about other then somebodies little text-like game?

Mike, don't you think that you could have contributed like a sentence at the end saying something that would bring the picture a little more into the real world focus? Heck, I would settle for something like "Sed is normally used for ........ to do ..... Pretty interesting use of sed because ......"

Just a thought.

Now what we need is...

[po8]

Consider the case of Andreas Junghanns, who wrote Rolling Stone, the world's top machine Sokoban solver, in C. I'm sure that even as you read this he is working on rewriting it in the Sokoban-friendly language sed.

Or not.

Under OS X

[rjamestaylor]

It runs under OS X (no Aqua support though...kidding) BUT not using Darwin/BSD's sed (/usr/bin/sed), rather using Fink's sed (/sw/bin/sed). Using the default sed, I get this error:

• sed: 2266: ./sokoban.sed: unexpected EOF (pending }'s)

Once again, GNU tools rule over BSD tools. Well, for gaming, anyway.

Doesn't work on Sun, either:

[larien]

$ ./sokoban.sed
Too many {'s$

Bleh...

Re:Don't mistake the tool for the skill...

[hey!]

I still use sed on occaision, although there's really nothing you can do in sed that you can't do with 'perl -e ...'. Partly this is because se style re's were just burned into my impressionable young brain back in the days of System III, but also I think that sed really embodies the Unix tools philosophy -- build simple tools that do one thing extremely well.

Of course this kind of hack shows that even simple tools can be used in unexpected ways. This is a good lesson to remember. This is a little OT, but I was thinking about this fact the other day when I was listening to people talk about placing blame for the security lapses on 9/11. One way to defeat security is to find behavioral possibilities inherent in the implementation of a system that aren't part of its design. In retrospect, it's easy to see you can smash a stack by putting machine language instructions into an unchecked buffer, but this attack was highly original the first time it was attempted. In retrospect, it easy to see that a large airliner loaded with fuel is a flying bomb, but to see this in advance is harder.