From: Dave Burt <burtdav@...>
Date: 2004-11-04T23:08:51+09:00
Subject: Re: [SUMMARY] Sokoban (#5)

"Ruby Quiz" <james@grayproductions.net>...
> Well, how far did you get?  I'm stuck on level 28 myself.
>
> As those of you who have now built Sokoban know, the game is quite trivial 
> to
> implement. Here's a very brief solution from Dennis Ranke: (...)

Wow! That's only 2 pages, about 0.08 small kLoC, or just over 1kB.

> requiring you to push enter/return to send a move.  While they do allow 
> you to
> queue up a long line of moves, this tires my poor little fingers out, 
> especially
> on involved levels.
>
> That begs the question, why did they use this approach?
>
> Portability, would be my guess. (...)

Yes, I didn't like it, either. While standard input does confer the 
advantage of being able to save solutions and feed them in to your program 
using pipes or terminal cut/pasting, it still isn't my preference. If Ruby 
on Windows came with Curses, it would have been done that way. If I could be 
bothered learning Fox, it would have been done that way.

How close is Fox to being "Swing for Ruby"? I ask because it works OK out of 
the one-click installer.

The idea just popped into my head, what about using the Swing API itself? 
It's all lightweight itself, in Java, isn't it? Only 3 native classes, or 
something like that... I put no weight on this, though.

> begin
>   require "Win32API"
>   def read_char
>     Win32API.new("crtdll", "_getch", [], "L").Call
>   end
>   rescue LoadError
>   def read_char
>     system "stty raw -echo"
>     STDIN.getc
>   ensure
>     system "stty -raw echo"
>   end
> end

(Saved for later use - thanks)

Cheers,
Dave