Muddling

DATE: 2013-12-13

In addition to dusting of my account here on Twenex.org, I've also been
rediscovering the PDP-10 systems (DEC-10 and TOAD-1) at the Living Computer
Museum and the public ITS hosts (SV and UP). From the instant one dips ones
toe into the ocean of retro computing, one finds a distractingly large number
of directions for potential exploration.

Only it's a little strange that none of these systems appear to have Scheme
installed. That's especially surprising for the ITSs.

Last night I looked into Muddle a little more. It's a version of Lisp developed
in 1971 that anticipated several features of both Scheme and object-oriented
programming. Since it was the language used for the original version of Zork,
I was especially curious whether it might include features aimed at adventure
game development.

Unfortunately, though it is an interesting language, Muddle doesn't appear to
have any specifically game-oriented features. Also, although there are three
extensive manuals available, none of them have much in the way of practical
examples, making it a little hard to get into programming in Muddle. The
original Zork source is available, though.

The final nail in Muddle's coffin is that the MDL105 executable here on 
Twenex.org seems broken, crashing every time I try to define a function.