##Zork Machine in C# #
Eric Lippert is writing a wonderful blog series, in which he implements a Z-Machine (the virtual machine layer for playing Zork and similar games) in OCaml.
I don't know any OCaml at all, and I wanted to follow along, so I am writing the same code in C#.
Please feel free to make comments or suggestions.
I think, so far, that there is a lot more ceremony in the C# code then in the OCaml code.
For example, my BitSize is a struct in its own
source file, and Eric's whole implementation is just
type bit_size = Bit_size of int
At first, I was making a million little .cs files that look like this:
public struct SpecialCaseOfInt
{
private int value;
public SpecialCaseOfInt(int value)
{
this.value = value;
}
public int Value { get {return this.value; } }
}
That gets pretty annoying, and is not nearly as succinct as the OCaml type system.
I am on the fence about whether to keep these all in their own files. The downside is that I have a whole file where OCaml just has a one liner, but the plus side is that I have a convenient place to keep helper functions.
All these types are as immutable as possible. They are structs, just because they are wrappers around a single value, and all operations that are defined for them return a mutated copy, but don't mutate the original instance.