Ellipsis #218
Ellipsis #218
Conversation
Previously, ellipses were a special value, which meant that all of the logic around them had to be special-cased every time. Now, they are represented as CellPattern objects with "hasEllipsis" set to true.
Ellipsis no longer needs to be alone; it just needs to be last. The
ellipsis will only span over matching blocks. This is useful for
line-of-sight sorts of things. For example, the rule for the Wizard in
Heroes of Sokoban can be simplified to:
[ > Wizard | no Wall no Crate ... | Crate ] -> [ Crate | ... | Wizard ]
Heroes of Sokoban III uses this more complicated formulation:
[ > Wizard ] -> [ Wizard > Warpball]
[ > Warpball | no Crate no Wall] -> [ | > Warpball]
[ > Warpball | Wall] [Wizard] -> [ | Wall ] [> Wizard]
[ > Warpball | Crate ] [Wizard] -> [ | Wizard ] [Crate]
[ > Warpball] [Wizard] -> [] [> Wizard]
This extension is backwards-compatible; an ellipsis pattern "A|B ...|C"
matches "A|C", "A|B|C", "A|B|B|C", etc., so if B is empty, the pattern
naturally matches "A|C", "A||C", "A|||C", etc.
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Hi, People have requested this before, and I've rejected it on simplicity grounds. It's pretty easy to read what's going on, I admit. BUT it is extra syntax to explain, and I find it (only) very slightly inelegant as notation goes. I have to be crazy conservative about adding extra capabilities to the language, even where they might seem to be a no-brainer, because it will result in the engine becoming a fussy mess (I've made one or two mistakes already in this regard (cf the 'rigid' keyword). So I'm going to sit on this for a while. But I do appreciate you putting in the work, and recognise that it must've taken a fair bit of trouble to figure out the funky code :) <3 S |
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OK, that's fine. How do you feel about just the first commit? No behavior change there, just less funky code. |
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In principle I think it might be good! I may integrate it for the next On Sun, Jun 1, 2014 at 10:40 PM, Chris Pickel notifications@github.com
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thanks :) On Mon, Jun 2, 2014 at 12:00 AM, Stephen Lavelle analytic@gmail.com wrote:
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jonah gives this the thumbs up... |
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I still can't motivate myself to incorporate this, even while I'd use it myself sometimes I don't like the notation, and can't think of a better notation. I'm going to close this and maybe in the future I'll be struck by inspiration for a notation for this that's more pleasing to me ^^ Thanks again! |
2 participants
Not extensively tested. Here's the three Wizard levels from Heroes of Sokoban using the new rule:
https://gist.github.com/sfiera/38520b8a950bb8db2f47