The more Wiz thought about that, the better he liked it. Forth, the best-known example of the genre, had been originally written to control telescopes and Forth was a common language in robotics. It had the kind of flexibility he needed and it was simple enough that one person could do the entire project.
That Forth is considered, at best, decidedly odd by most programmers didn’t bother Wiz in the slightest.
The critical question was whether or not a spell could call other spells. The way Shiara had used a counting demon to trigger the destruction spell in her final adventure implied that it could, but the idea seemed foreign to her.
He sat on the hearth, sketching in the pale moonlight until the moon sank below the horizon and it became too dark to see. Reluctantly he made his way back to bed and crawled under the covers, his excitement fighting his body’s insistence on sleep.
Nothing fancy, he told himself. He would have to limit his basic element to those safe, insensitive spells Shiara had mentioned. So what if they didn’t do much on their own? Most assembler commands didn’t do much either. The thing that made them powerful was you could string them together quickly and effectively under the structure of the language.
Oh yes, debugging features. It would need a moby debugger. Bugs in a magic program could crash more than the system.
It’s a pity the universe doesn’t use segmented architecture with a protected mode, Wiz thought to himself as he drifted off.
As he was slipping into unconsciousness, he remembered one of his friend Jerry’s favorite bull session raps. He used to maintain that the world was nothing but an elaborate computer simulation. “All I want is a few minutes with the source code and a quick recompile,” his friend used to tell him.
He fell asleep wondering if he would get what Jerry had wanted.
All through the next day Wiz’s mind was boiling. As he chopped wood or worked in the kitchen he was mentally miles away with dictionaries and compiler/interpreters. He didn’t tell Moira because he knew she wouldn’t like the notion. For that matter, he wasn’t sure Shiara would approve. So when they were sitting alone tht evening he broached the subject obliquely.
“Lady, do you have to construct a spell all at once?”
“I am not sure I know what you mean, Sparrow.”
“Can’t you put parts of simple spells together to make a bigger one?”
Shiara frowned. “Well, you can link some spells together, but . . .”
“No, I mean modularize your spells. Take a part of a spell that produces one effect and couple it to a part of a spell that has another effect and make a bigger spell.”
“That is not the way spells work, Sparrow.”
“Why not?” Wiz asked. “I mean couldn’t they work that way?”
“I have never heard of a spell that did,” the former wizardess said.
“Wouldn’t it be easier that way?” he persisted.
“There are no shortcuts in magic. Spells must be won through hard work and discipline.”
“But you said . . .”
“And what I said was true,” Shiara cut him off. “But there are things which cannot be put into words. A spell is one, indivisible. You cannot break it apart and put it back together in a new guise any more than you can take a frog apart and turn it into a bird.”
“In my world we used to do things like that all the time.”
Shiara smiled. “Things work differently in this world, Sparrow.”
“I don’t see why,” Wiz said stubbornly.
Shiara sighed. “Doubtless not, Sparrow. You are not a magician. You do not know what it is like to actually cast spells, much less weave them. If you did it would be obvious.”
Wiz wasn’t sure who had said “be sure you’re right and then go ahead,” but that had been his motto ever since childhood. The stubborn willingness to go against common opinion,and sometimes against direct orders, had gotten him the reputation for being hard to manage, but it had also made him an outstanding programmer. He was used to people telling him his ideas wouldn’t work. Most of the time they were wrong and Wiz had always enjoyed proving that. In this case he knew he was right and he was going to prove it.