wump - Perl port of the ``Hunt the Wumpus'' game
wump
Move around the tunnels and shoot the wumpus. Don't get eaten by the
wumpus, don't fall into a pit, don't hit yourself with an arrow, watch out
for bats.
The game gives more instructions. (Embedded documentation! Could this be a
precursor to POD?)
Because ``Hunt the Wumpus'' is one of the classics of early BASIC coding, I
decided to stick as closely as possible to the original BASIC code. In this
way, this program can serve not only as a fun way to while away the hours
while waiting for batch jobs; but it can also be useful to teach the hordes
of coders currently moving from 1970's BASIC to Perl.
I was mostly able to get a 1:1 correspondence between lines. You may notice
that the Perl code is a bit longer, which I guess proves that BASIC is more
powerful and concise. The only places I cheated were to remove goto's
(although I was sorely tempted to use a ``goto EXPR'' for the ``ON ...
GOTO''s).
Inputs are changed into upper case for your gaming convenience.
``Wumpus'' can be found in the Jargon File. Some have gone so far as to say
that this was the ``first text adventure''. In that case, I'm glad text
adventures have developed since then.
I have faithfully ported the lack of a ``Quit'' option. Also the spelling
mistakes, and any bugs in the original. For example, you can shoot an arrow
to go through rooms ``1 2 2'', which shouldn't be legal. But faithful
porting means faithful porting.
Error message under -w
This program is copyright (C) Amir Karger 1999. (Although I can't imagine
why)
This program is free and open software. You may use, copy, modify,
distribute and sell this program (and any modified variants) in any way you
wish, provided you do not restrict others to do the same.
Apparently, many of them.
Some web sites claim this game was originally written by Gregory Yob, and
published in Creative Computing Magazine in the September/October 1975
issue. The OpenBSD man pages say it was ``People's Computer Company'' in
1973. The BASIC code I used may or may not be the text that appeared in
David Ahl's book ``101 BASIC Computer Games''.
Ported by Amir Karger karger@post.harvard.edu March,
1999