Starfarer VS minimicro-sysdisk

So this is a classic path-finding problem, for which A* (also known as best-first search) is the standard solution. I know I've written that a few times in the past, but I didn't have a standard library for it just sitting around. I searched my hard drive for file names containing "path" and ".ms", expecting to find a path-finding module I seem to recall writing for Farmtronics. But instead I found this script from a half-written space trader game called Starfarer.

He's currently divided his work into two projects on GitHub: MiniScript.TS is the language core, while MiniScript-NodeJS adds Node.js support and a script-runner. The latter includes support for print and input, the import command, and a subset of the Mini Micro /sys disk.

This might be of interest if you already know BASIC, and want to quickly bang out a game or utility. MiniBASIC provides a good set of high-resolution drawing commands, suitable for making plots, graphs, and diagrams. It also has access to all the data on the built-in /sys disk, including stock images, sounds, and a complete English word list! And, being completely cross-platform, Mini Micro (and so MiniBASIC) runs identically on any desktop computer (and soon mobile devices, too). So if BASIC is already in your wheelhouse, MiniBASIC offers a great way to take advantage of these Mini Micro features.

This uses a couple of tricks which you could glean from the startup.ms file on the system disk (/sys/startup.ms):

So as usual, I come away with a realization for something that really ought to exist in MiniScript: an efficient sort algorithm that takes a comparison function as an argument. I'll code this up soon, and who knows, it might even find its way into a future version of /sys/lib/listUtil.

One lesson learned is that I should always validate my function inputs. Had my findPath function simply checked that it was being passed two 2-element lists, I would have caught my error right away and fared much better. Grabbing code from somewhere else is no excuse; the first thing I should have done is examined the parameters, and added a quick qa.assert to me sure I call it correctly.

Once again, my starter program did me no good; nor did I need any of the stuff I've been gathering in my custom aoc module, or even the standard /sys/lib modules. The solution was plain, unadorned MiniScript. ❤️

My code for this one came out considerably longer than in previous days, despite havng a separate (prepared ahead of time) aoc module and all the other modules in Mini Micro's /sys/lib folder to lean on. So I'll present it in sections.