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ABOUT.TXT
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ABOUT ARCHETYPE
Archetype is a simple, stripped-down object-oriented programming
language designed for the writing of text adventure games; for example,
the interpreter has a partial natural language parser, and the language's
"write" statement pauses every 24 lines during long pieces of text so
that it will not get lost off the top of the screen.
However, Archetype does not have everything necessary for quickly
creating an adventure game because the language is more general-purpose
than that. There are about a thousand lines of code in the files
INTRPTR.ACH, LEXICON.ACH, and CARDINAL.ACH, all of which are included
when your adventure includes STANDARD.ACH . Thus much of Archetype is
itself written in Archetype.
The language consists of a translator, called CREATE.EXE, and an
interpreter called PERFORM.EXE . The interpreter expects a file that
has been syntactically and semantically verified by CREATE.EXE and
turned into a binary format. This half-a-compiler/interpreter pair
design is found in other languages, such as Icon and certain versions of
LISP. It is not a full interpreter, such as BASIC, nor a full compiler,
such as Pascal.
Archetype was developed using Turbo Pascal 5.5 on an IBM-compatible
laptop with an 8088 processor, two disk drives (no hard drive), and a
10 MHz clock. Because of this, the compiler and interpreter were
designed to minimize disk use, getting things into memory as quickly as
possible and working with them there. As a result it makes tremendous
use of dynamic memory. On a higher-end machine, the disk may actually
be faster than dynamically allocating memory, so this architecture may
not run as much faster as you might expect on a faster machine.
I'd like to know what you think of both the games in this archive and the
language itself. If you would like to try writing an adventure game, I
would really like to know how easy or difficult you found it using
Archetype and the STANDARD.ACH include files.
But what I would like to know even more is if you can think of an
application for Archetype other than writing adventure games. Somebody
once said that the best tool is one which is used for a purpose other than
the one for which it was designed. The file ANIMAL.ACH in this archive
shows one different way to use Archetype.
Archetype 1.0 was distributed as shareware. Archetype 1.01 (this version)
is distributed public-domain, along with its Turbo Pascal source code and
the Archetype source code for the adventures. You are free to copy this
source code and publish it anywhere, so long as no fee is charged for it
and my name remains on it.
Enjoy!
Derek T. Jones
Snail mail: 9642 E. 32nd Street
Tucson, AZ 85748
E-mail: [email protected]