I spent the past two days at “Digital Humanities: The Next Generation,” a conference held at Simmons College. Patsy Baudoin and Nick Montfort gave a presentation about 10 PRINT, a book they co-authored that turns a critical eye to a one-line computer program written in BASIC for the Commodore 64.

10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10

The 10 PRINT authors explain how the code works, but here’s a brief explanation. The PRINT command outputs a character to the screen. The randomization function selects between characters 205 and 206. Then the GOTO 10 command returns to the beginning of the line and runs the command in an endless loop. The output of the program is a diagonal maze.

As part of the demonstration, Patsy and Nick brought two Commodore 64s for the audience to try. That was fun: I’d never played with a Commodore. While we were waiting our turn, Shane Landrum and I decided to translate the program into another computer language. He chose Perl, and I chose Ruby. In about 10 minutes, we tied in reproducing the output. Here are our solutions:

While these solutions both worked as a port to another language, I wasn’t satisfied with mine as a translation into another language. Its output didn’t have the same maze-like appearance as the Commodore 64’s, nor did it have the same aesthetic as the BASIC program. Just as a translator might attempt different renderings of a poem, I tried several renderings of the code. I never found a translation that was at once faithful to everything I liked in the BASIC program and fully idiomatic Ruby. In the spirit of the 10 PRINT book and critical code studies, here are some of the translations that I tried along with commentary.

Solution 1

character = ["/","\\"]

while true do
select = Random.new.rand(0..1)
print character[select]
end

My first inclination was to separate each logical part of the program on its own line. In this first attempt, I was trying to reproduce only the output of the Commodore 64 and not the style of the code. This solution is idiomatic, though not very elegant, Ruby.

First, I create an array of characters, the forward slash (/) and the backward slash (\). There are a two backslashes as the second element of the array because Ruby uses that character as an escape sequence.

Second, I use a block of code between the do and end statements. A code block is a common element in Ruby programs, so the feel of the program is more Ruby than BASIC. Because of the while true condition, this block of code will be repeated forever. Notice that the BASIC program uses the GOTO 10 command to accomplish the same thing, but since that is a peculiarity of BASIC, it cannot be literally translated into Ruby or Perl. Both Shane and I chose to use while statements to accomplish the same effect.

Third, the program assigns a random number between 0 and 1 to a variable. Because both BASIC and Ruby share the same limitations, the numbers that are generated are pseudorandom, rather than truly random. Here Random.new.rand calls a method on a class Random to make a new object, then calls the function rand to generate the random number. A key difference between Ruby and BASIC is that BASIC is an imperative programming language, while Ruby is an object-oriented language. I could have obscured this difference by substituting the rand method for Random.new.rand. There is a noticeable etymological similarity between BASIC’s RND and Ruby’s rand, but the apparent similarity of function is deceptive. In Ruby rand is really a method call on a different object, Kernel, since in Ruby everything is an object.

Fourth, the program uses the variable to select one of the characters from the array and then prints it. BASIC’s PRINT and Ruby’s print (same in Perl) are the same word and serve the same function, like a cognate word in human languages. In Ruby, though, the command print doesn’t quite seem right. In most cases where I would output text, I would use the command puts, which is more common in Ruby. But since puts adds a new line and since print does not, we need the latter option to produce the right output.

This is the output of solutions 1 through 3:

Solution 2

The most obvious defect of the first translation is that the Ruby code takes five lines to do the same thing that the BASIC code does in one. Does each Catullan couplet require an entire English sonnet? The next solution gets the code down to one line.

print ['/','\\'][Random.new.rand(0..1)] while true
The code is compressed by eliminating assignments to variables. We've also eliminated the `do` code block. But because we still need the `while` logic, we've moved the condition to the end of the line. Though we can't use the same mechanism as BASIC to create an endless loop, at least by moving the `while` to end we get a structural similarity to BASIC.

Solution 3

print ['/','\\'][rand(0..1)] while true

One of the features of the BASIC program is brevity, so rand is preferable to Random.new.rand. We emphasize the cognate, while making it more subtle that everything in Ruby is an object.

Solution 4

The second most obvious defect of the translations so far is that the forward slash and backslash characters don’t produce the correct output. Because these glyphs don’t occupy the full character width, they do not connect to make the maze. As the authors of 10 PRINT point out, the Commodore 64 had its own character set (PETSCII) and a different keyboard than is now standard. We’d be better off with different characters.

print ["\u2571","\u2572"][rand(0..1)] while true

In this solution we use two Unicode characters, U+2571 and U+2572, which map more closely to the PETSCII characters. But just as we have to use method calls to objects in Ruby rather than simple functions, here we have to use Unicode rather than the limited character set of the Commodore 64. The output looks much better:

Solution 5

We could leave our solution well enough alone. It’s idiomatic Ruby, and print, rand, and the loop logic each gesture to the BASIC program.

But one of the interesting features of the BASIC code is the logic that it uses to select the characters. Let’s look at this more closely:

CHR$(205.5+RND(1))

The two PETSCII characters have the index numbers 205 and 206. By starting with the number 205.5 and adding a random number between 0 and 1, the CHR function selects character 205 half the time, and character 206 half the time. This is quite ingenious: more ingenious than our solution for Ruby needs to be, since Ruby is more powerful at dealing with strings. Needlessly complicated code is just spaghetti code, but much of the pleasure of reading code comes from understanding clever solutions that get around limitations of the language. We can get a lot closer to the BASIC with this Ruby code:

print (9585+rand(0..1)).chr(Encoding::UTF_8) while true

Here we’re accessing the same Unicode characters as in solution 4, but using a decimal rather than a hexadecimal system of enumeration. We want characters 9585 or 9586. We’ve stopped choosing our characters from an array, which is a data structure not available in BASIC. We start with 9585 and add either 0 or 1 to it. Then we call the chr method on that integer. Notice that though we can do without arrays, once again we can’t get away from Ruby’s objects, since chr is a method of the class Integer. The chr method turns the integer into a character. We’ve gained another cognate, from CHR to chr. But because Ruby, unlike the Commodore 64’s BASIC, can handle a number of encodings, we have to tell the method that we’re using UTF-8. As a result, we’ve lost some brevity.

Conclusion

None of these solutions reaches my goal of translating the code into idiomatic Ruby that still preserves the notable features of the BASIC. I’d be glad to know if you can come up with a better translation. This exercise isn’t just about generating random mazes: it’s also a look into the “elegance” of programming languages. As the 10 PRINT authors point out, code is not just the output of a program, but the culture that surrounds the code as an artifact. Ruby is widely regarded as an elegant language, which is why it’s the first language that I’ve learned in depth, with help from other Rubyist historians. I think solution 4, at least, is elegant Ruby. Solution 5, though, pays better tribute the ingenuity of the original BASIC.

Appendix: How to run this code

You can run each of these solutions for yourself in a terminal. The easiest way to do this is to paste the entire line of code between the '' in this command, which interprets the code with Ruby.

ruby -e 'CODE GOES HERE'
To quit the program, press `CTRL+C`.
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