In article <···············@calvay.dcs.ed.ac.uk>, Juliusz Chroboczek
<···@dcs.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Slightly off subject for this group, but I think that the people who
>might know the answer are here.
>
> What were (or are?) the programming languages MDL and Plasma?
>
> As I understand it, both were MIT languages in the '70s; MDL was a
>direct competitor to MacLisp and ZetaLisp, while Plasma, although
>based on very different ideas, was an inspiration for Scheme.
MDL was just the vowel-less name of MUDDLE, which was one of the several
dialects of Lisp around MIT at that time. It has been characterized by
one of its principal users as "Lisp 1.5 with data types," and survived
well outside the scope of either MIT or what would likely otherwise have
been its lifespan by being the language in which the wildly popular Zork
adventure games were written (MDL was trimmed and slimmed and
reimplemented on PC-class computers such as the TRS-80 as ZIL, Zork
Implementation Language, which was essentially MDL without a lot of fancy
I/O features that only made sense on timeshared mainframes anyway).
In fact, not more than three years ago, "Return to Zork," from Activision,
was still written in ZIL, although ZIL had gotten absorbed into a larger
framework, MADE, with which to do Multimedia Application Development (the
"E" is for "Environment.") At this point, ZIL has been completely
deprecated in favor of a C++ framework.
Paul Snively
Former Activision Employee/Unofficial Infocom Hystorian [sic]
> Thank you for your help,
>
> Juliusz Chroboczek
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