The TADS Tutorial - Mark Engelberg
    (Part of SynTax Disk 1306 and on this issue's disk!)

                  Reviewed by John Ferris

Mark Engelberg is a retired programmer and games designer who
volunteered to teach programming at a local school. He decided to
use TADS, the popular adventure game language.

The tutorial consists of eleven Word documents with accompanying
".t" files, or TADS source code. The course introduces the student
to the basics of adventure game writing and then proceeds to teach
the fundamentals of the language.

The course comes as a ZIP file that contains the documents and
source files, but doesn't contain the text editor. Any text editor
or word processor that can save as ASCII (.TXT) can be used, but I
recommend using one which can display line numbers. This saves
loads of time when debugging.

The first point to note is that all the source code is written
using the "C" option, not the TADS standard (Pascal) option. To
non- TADS programmers this means:

                   Pascal   C
Assignment         :=       =
Test for equality   =       == (two equal signs)
Not equal           <>      !=

I have looked through a number of the course documents and apart
from being written in American they are all very clear. By
following the tutorial, the student is introduced gradually to the
various classes and how they can be used.

If this course had been around a few years back my initial problem
with learning the language would have been halved I'm sure. This
tutorial is not a replacement for the manual, but it is a lot
easier to use with many practical examples. One problem with the
TADS manual is that little nuggets of useful information can be
hidden away in the dense script. At the end of the tutorial the
student could quite happily write fairly decent games and would
possess the ability to get the best out of the TADS manual itself.

I recommend this tutorial to anyone who is thinking of starting
out with TADS, to those needing a refresher course after a break
and perhaps even to the more experienced user. The only problem is
for those who are unable to use Word documents; perhaps text
versions will be available.

The TADS tutorial is available at ftp.gmd.de as TADSTutorial.zip.
The "PFE" text editor apparently lives at
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/people/cpaap/pfe.

Incidentally, for those in the UK, a fast GMD mirror lives at
ftp.firedrake.org/if-archive In my experience, it's pretty darn
quick.



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