SearchYC.com

I couldn't resist kens' challenge in http://arcfn.com/2008/05/using-opengl-with-arc.html to build tetris in arc. So it's done, using java and swing. Install rainbow as described in http://arclanguage.org/item?id=6975 , then

  java -jar rainbow.jar -f lib/rainbow/tetris.arc -e '(tetris)'

Use u,h,j,k,p and n for rotate, left, drop, right, pause/unpause and new game, respectively. Score (expt 2 n) for clearing n lines. Game size, inital delay, acceleration, colours, and key bindings are configurable in the first few lines of tetris.arc.

It fits in 206 lines, vs 303 for something almost equivalent in java. As I'm not used to thinking in lisp yet, the arc tetris can probably be compressed further. I've kept the java-swing dependencies minimal so it should be easy to port to another ui.

It's a little bit flickery and not totally bug-free, but sufficient to relive several hours of well-spent youth.

The tetris effort uncovered a couple of rainbow flaws: (sleep n) was behaving like (coma) - it slept, then recursively invoked itself. Duh. And atomic-invoke wasn't working at all, on account of the java compiler not being able to read my mind. I'll need to file a bug with Sun. Both fixed now.

enjoy!

I've been playing with welder a bit recently and I even added a little macro-expander for it. It's not very pretty - I don't know how to format the output nicely. I put together an introduction with a few screenshots at http://www.fnargs.com/2009/05/introducing-welder.html so you could at least see what it looks like. It's still horribly slow on big files (arc.arc is "big" for this purpose), so not ready for public consumption.