“Speaking of which, what is that you’ve been hacking on so furiously?”
“Kind of an experiment,” Jerry said, turning back to the code. “I’m trying to see how well the magic compiler works in a more conventional computer language.”
“You’re translating the thing into C?”
“Well, no,” Jerry said. “I thought I’d try something that was a little less tied to computer architecture. Something more general.”
Wiz looked over his shoulder at the lines of luminescent characters suspended in midair. Then he squinted and leaned closer.
The magic compiler was written in a combination of this world’s runes, the English alphabet and various made-up symbols. To the uninitiated a spell listing looked like someone’s graphics card had barfed on the screen. But even compared to that, this listing was strange. In addition to the “normal” symbols, there were tiny squares, triangles, right angles and things that were even less comprehensible. Wiz scanned the display several times, frowning.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that was . . .”
“Yep,” Jerry said proudly. “APL.”
Wiz groaned.
“Hey, you’re a fine one to complain. Who wrote the first spell interpreter in a hacked-up version of Forth?”
“That was different,” Wiz said with some dignity. “Forth was exceptionally well suited to what I needed to do.”
“So is this,” Jerry informed him. “APL is an extremely elegant language. You can express a whole series of complex mathematical operations in a single line of code simply, unambiguously and logically.”
Wiz tore his eyes away from the mess above Jerry’s desk and poured himself another mug of blackmoss tea. “If you’ve got a computer that can produce hieroglyphics and if you never need to remember what you did.”
“Nonsense. It’s no harder to write understandable code in APL than anything else. You can even write incomprehensible code in C.”
“I rest my case.”
Before Jerry could reply the door banged open and Danny limped in.
“How’s the back?” Wiz asked, grateful for a respite from what promised to be a full-scale language debate.
“Getting better,” the young programmer said, plopping himself down in his chair. He leaned forward almost forty-five degrees. “See? No pain.”
Considering the extent of his injuries, Danny was lucky to be alive, much less walking around. A blast from a guard’s weapon had nearly burned him in half during the great battle for Caermort almost three years before. Magic had saved him and magic had healed him, but not even the world’s most skillful healers could restore him fully in safety. So for months he had been going to the healers in the Wizard’s Keep for a combination of physical therapy, massage and healing magic. Gradually but steadily he was improving.
The third member of the software development team was several years younger with fresh good looks that made him look younger still. Even before his ordeal he had been slender, but the rigors of his recovery had taken flesh off his bones until he was positively skinny, despite the best efforts of his wife June and the castle cooks to feed him up.
He looked over at the characters above Jerry’s desk. “What’s that?” he asked, levering himself out of the chair and limping over to join them.
“APL,” Wiz told him. “He could have been doing something useful and he’s been writing an APL interpreter.”
“Well, whatever makes you happy,” Danny said with a shrug.
“Like figuring out how to tap into our world’s telephone system, I suppose,” Jerry retorted.
“Hey, we needed an Internet connection. We have to keep up with what’s going on back in the real world. Besides,” he added, “you’re the one who’s on that thing four hours a night.”
“I have a lot of newsgroups I have to keep up with,” Jerry said virtuously. “There’s a lot going on there.”
“Well, better keep it away from the wizards,” Wiz said. “I’m not sure what they’d make of some of those newsgroups.”
“You mean like the alt.sex groups?” Danny asked.
“I was thinking more of comp.language.flames, but yeah, the alt.sex groups too. Especially alt.sex.gerbils.
duct-tape.”
“That’s bogus,” Jerry said. “The real name is alt.sex.
bestiality.hamster.duct-tape.”
It was Danny’s turn to look smug. “You mean that’s another group. Just because it’s not in the official alt hierarchy you can’t find it.”