Looks like Allegro 5 is on track to actually getting released. Evert had the honor of doing the historic commit:

Revision: 12842
http://alleg.svn.sourceforge.net/alleg/?rev=12842&view=rev
Author:   eglebbk
Date:     2010-01-24 23:13:25 +0000 (Sun, 24 Jan 2010)

Log Message:
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Removed END_OF_MAIN() from all Allegro examples and from the library.

For me the END_OF_MAIN macro always was one of the bad things about Allegro 4 and now in A5 we finally have done away with it. Why it was so hard to get rid of it is an interesting story all by itself… but not what I was going to post about…

In fact the reason I’m posting is just to keep my three-posts-per-year rate up. Seeing how it’s still only January, I might even do much better this year. On the other hand with work and all kinds of other troubles I highly doubt that. And my focus also is more on Sword of Fargoal than on Allegro 5 right now – still maybe there will be a weekend where I spontaneously decide to take part in a LudumDare or similar. I kinda missed the last LD as well as PyWeek and SpeedHack – much harder to have time for this kind of things now. And I miss them a lot.

Anyway, I plan to port one of my games on this site to my ipod using Allegro 5. Haven’t decided which one yet. But it will be some incentive to hack on A5. That is if Trent has left any bugs to fix for me in the iphone port. Not sure I’ll really get around to it though and then whether I’ll submit the game to the app store… it would mean getting a dev license and for that ideally first registering a company name – which may be easy and cheap, but just as well may be not.

Just upgraded wordpress to 2.8.4, and since I felt like throwing away some money, purchased a domain for this site. After being up for 10 years or so it deserves it. So, I can view my homepage now by typing in allefant.com instead of allefant.sf.net

Guess it’s time to put an update here lest the wordpress upgrade will be the only post this year. Well, I just added 3 of my game entries I made in the last year or so: Ultimatum (TINS 2008), The Wave (LD #14) and Lawn (PyWeek 8).

Really looking forward to the next Allegro speedhack now which will be in a few days – and I should have time to spend the whole weekend making an entry. Of course, as always, speedhack has lots of rules the game must abide to… so can’t do any advance planning. Which is the fun in it.

This was my TINS 2008 entry.

This was my LudumDare 2009 entry.

This was my entry to pyweek 2009.

Good points about Lua I’ve seen at first glance:

• Human readable syntax.
• Simple, fast and small virtual machine.
• Secure embedded execution.
• Easy to embed and extend in a C program.

Bad points:

• Syntax is almost too simple – it’s almost 100% identical to a 20 year old BASIC dialect.
• Variables are global instead of local by default – catastrophic design mistake.
• Arrays start with “1″ instead of “0″. Somewhat cumbersome.

The global variables are a kinda big issue, makes it very hard to use scripts in a good way if you have many of them. But of course nothing stops you from sticking a “local” before every use of a variable – which would negates the “human readable” part in the good points though. Oh well.

For now, see here for the pyweek logs: http://pyweek.org/e/allefant7/

Just upgraded to wordpress 2.7.1, which was suspiciously easy. The theme still works, page categories plugin still works (the plugin is still required though).In fact nothing looks different except the admin section. And all I did was unzip the new version over the old then let the auto-update thing convert the database or whatever. Well, really nice for sure, big plus point to the wordpress devs.

1 2 3 4 5 6 + – - + -

How long do you need to calculate the result if you just read along letter by letter? A long time, because until you reach the first plus sign, you simply can’t do anything at all but remember the numbers. And we’re bad at remembering many things.

Just to make this clear, do the same in in-fix notation:

6 + 5 – 4 – 3 + 2 – 1

Reading along letter by letter, when you get to the last “1″, you already have the answer of the calculation. This is not because we are used to infix notation more than RPN – it is just because it is the natural way things work.

This also is not only the case for mathematical formulas, but also language. If I say “I gave you a book.”, then in RPN it would be something like “I you book a gave”. Or “I went to the shop and bought a book.” would be “Book a I shop the to went bought and.”