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Crowther's Original Adventure Source Code Found

Posted by kdawson on from the hollow-voice-says-plugh dept.

drxenos writes "I don't know how many of you are fans of old-school text adventures (interactive fiction), but Will Crowther's original Fortran source code has been located in a backup of Don Woods's old student account. For fans like me, this is like finding the Holy Grail."

1 of 309 comments (clear)

  1. Re:A good example of how coding has progressed by fm6 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Memory is not the issue here. Turbo Pascal was designed to run in a single 64K 8086 segment, and Pascal is the quintessential block-structured language. The real problem is that the designers of FORTRAN were totally ignorant of the principles of language design. They could hardly be otherwise: FORTRAN was the very first high-level language.

    But here's a sobering thought: Dijkstra launched his attack on the goto statement in 1968. Every programmer who's grown up with block structured languages would take it as a given that Dijkstra was right. But at the time, the concept was extremely controversial, and there was a lot of resistance — as evidenced by the fact that Crowther and Wood were still using computed gotos in 1976!