dBase III and Adventures games/Interactive Fiction

[jhd]

 

Back in 1988, I completed a Computers in Business course that include a module on programming with dBase III. 

 

At the time, I was a big fan of text adventure games (known today as Interactive Fiction), and it always occurred to me that it may be possible to create something using the dBase programming language. I lacked both the time and the skill to develop something, so sadly, it never moved beyond the vague idea stage.

 

Has such a project ever been done?  

[Mr SQL]

On 8/14/2020 at 1:49 PM, jhd said:

 

Back in 1988, I completed a Computers in Business course that include a module on programming with dBase III. 

 

At the time, I was a big fan of text adventure games (known today as Interactive Fiction), and it always occurred to me that it may be possible to create something using the dBase programming language. I lacked both the time and the skill to develop something, so sadly, it never moved beyond the vague idea stage.

 

Has such a project ever been done?  

Interesting idea! The early work I did writing Text Adventure Games linking multiple 2D and 3D arrays in memory and on disk storage helped me immensely with Database design and concept later on.  

 

I also saw parallels in the Eliza inspired full text parser and the SEQUEL language design; before the name was changed to SQL, SEQUEL stood for Structured English Query language, with the idea being it was so high level the user could basically write the answer in "English" and the parser came up with all of the low level retrieval code transparently. Being relational calculus you still have to be word smith capable of complex sentence structure and grammatical syntax to program in it, but it's higher level for being relational and for being natural language like.