In order to auto-generate the compiler output and game transcripts shown in some places of the Manual, some source files are provided in this folder.
Table of Contents
The idea is to ensure that compiler output and code examples transcripts provided in the Manual will always reflect the current status of the Alan compiler and interpreter.
Whenever a new Alan version (i.e. a new Beta version) is released, the Alan Manual needs to be updated accordingly, and these scripts should be updated too because the new ALAN compiler or ARun versions might create slightly different output.
The correct version of the Alan SDK must be used to ensure that the output matches that of the Alan SDK version of the Alan Manual — usually these updates are done only for new Beta releases, so just drop in this folder copies of the latest Beta SDK binaries.
The generated scripts need to be copied and pasted over the old ones, directly in the AsciiDoc sources (see Note below).
NOTE — Currently, the output of these scripts is being manually copied and pasted into the AsciiDoc sources of the Alan Manual, after being generated/updated via their batch/shell scripts.
In the future (if the number of scripts grows) we might include them directly into the AsciiDoc sources via the
include::directive, now that Asciidoctor added support for other encodings, including ISO-8859-1 — thanks to Dan Allen for the Asciidoctor organization for accepting our feature request (see asciidoctor/asciidoctor#3248).
| ext | in/out | description |
|---|---|---|
.log |
output | Compiler/ARun logs (-help, debug, reports, etc., except game transcripts). |
.a3s |
input | Commands script (aka solution) fed to ARun in order to produce an .a3t transcript. |
.a3t |
output | Generated game transcript (aka walkthrough). |
.bat/.sh |
— | Scripts to generate the required output. |
The scripts in this folder are presented in their order of appearance in the Alan Manual, for simplicity sake.
These sources and scripts are used to reproduce the exact compiler errors report shown in the Manual at "F.1. Format of messages".
ZILexample.alan— adventure with errors.ZILexample.batZILexample.log— compiler errors report.
The ZILexample.bat script simply invokes the Alan compiler on the malformed ZILexample.alan adventure to capture the errors report into ZILexample.log:
CALL alan ZILexample 1> ZILexample.log