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MSWL Olmec PBEM Soccer Game GPL'ed
zeb writes "MSWL is one of the most popular PBEM football (soccer for North Americans) game, which is itself a variation of a game of postal soccer invented by Alan Parr in England around 1970. In this game, each manager has to organise his team, manage fatigue, train his players and trade them.
Olmec is a game engine written by Alla Sellers. It helps the commissioner (game master) to simulate the games and publish the results. Allan has decided to release the source code of Olmec under the GPL, so that everyone can enhance the program.
The actual version of Olmec is written in Visual Basic and uses MS Access as a database. The author suggests Olmec could be rewritten in a multiplatform language, for example Java, using MySQL as the database. This task is made easy because of the rich documentation about the game engine (PDF format)."
People like you are a pet peave of mine.
Having uncommented code is a hell of a lot better than having no code at all. As someone who has reverse engineered (well, re-implemented) closed source binaries starting from nothing more than a bunch of strace logs, I can tell you I'd take the source any day, and in any condition.
It's not as if the guy removed comments that used to be there for the purpose of obfuscation. You are looking at a "Golden Rule" situation -- you get what he got.
You don't like at the absence of comments ? Add them as you assimilate the code.
That's what I do with the commentless code I get from my co-workers. Do I bitch at them to add comments ? No, because I'd rather the guys write more code ! Code is what runs ! Code makes me money ! I don't want these guys oppressed by my bitching of some bureaucratic requirements doc or checkin procedure.
If I have to decipher something, I always make notes to myself in the form of comments. If his code works perfectly, it probably never gets commented.
So quit winning and turn out the annotated version of this stuff. If your comments aren't just so much repetition of the code, maybe we'll work from your version.
Can we, please, stop arguing the language anything is done. Language is not important - I have created high performance systems in Algol, Fortran, MUMPS, assembler ( several ), VB, Pascal, REXX, PL/I, "C", C++, APL, you name it.. Even Tcl/Tk, Python, Java, Cobol - who cares.. The important thing is that someone is giving a system for us ! Don't complain that and have a nice day..