Safety Valve

[Edit: since the redhoterlang.org blog is now defunct, I have republished the text here. ] As mentioned in my previous post, I did some work this summer with manipulating Subversion dump files using Erlang. I've written a probably way too long text about this for the RedHotErlang blog maintained by my friend and colleague, the legendary Tobbe T. If you're interested in this sort of thing - for example, if you're currently thinking about how to convert your messy Subversion repository to Git - you might want to read it. Or perhaps you just want something to help you go to sleep. Otherwise, you're forgiven if you don't follow that link.

This last weekend, I somehow came to think about the wonderful old space trading game Elite, and the way it managed to cram a vast universe of planets with names, stats, and fun descriptions (along with the 3D space flight simulation, which was an amazing feat in itself) into the tiny 8-bit home computers of old. Only minutes later, I had found Ian Bell's Text Elite web page, where Ian, one of the two original authors of the game, has published a reconstruction in C of the main universe-generating algorithm, along with a simple text interface to actually let you "play", i.e., buy, sell, and jump between planets. Great! So I rewrote it in Erlang . And had a lot of fun doing it. Apart from the nostalgic kick, there were two points with the exercise: First of all, I just wanted to see the main algorithm as cleanly implemented as possible. But second, I wanted to see what it would be like to rewrite a piece of classic game code that was very clearly not written with function...