On Wed, 29 Oct 1997, John Evans wrote:
< *snip* discussion about circle as a learing tool>
Well I have to admit that I fall into the catagory of people who decided
to learn C because they wanted to work on a MUD. I'd say that I'm still
pretty green as far as C goes but I think there is 2 different classes of
people who don't know C who decide it's a good idea to start a MUD.
1) the person who just thinks having a MUD would be cool so they download
it, figure out that it's pretty vanila and want someone to tell them
exactly waht to do to make it better.
2) The person (me) who downloaded the code, looked through it, figured out
that he/she didn't have a prayer of learning C from looking at the code
and went out and bought a couple books and read them. Then went back to
the code and spent 2 weeks looking through all the source to try to get a
little understanding of how things work.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I agree with John that anyone who
attempts to start a MUD should take the time to a) learn at least basic
ANSI C and b) get a good feel for what gets done where in the code. I'm
by no means an expert but I've taught myself enough to either be able to
do what I want or know where I can find pieces of code that are similar
so I can look at them and figure it out. It does help that I have
programming expierence in other languages but VB is a far cry from C. And
the college Pascal and Modula II arn't good for more than knowing good
structure. It took me forever to get out of the habit of typing ':=' and
remembering to use '==' for compairsons. An "if (x = y)" error is evil to
find when you're just learing :).
If someone takes the time to learn the basics before they try to actually
add code they would be 100 times better off. Some people don't want to
take that time though. I think it's that group that the people on
this list get frustrated with.
Rich
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