STORY
The Star Trek BASIC Game and the Spaceship Operator
The Star Trek BASIC Game and the Spaceship Operator
- During my marathon 9th-grade programming sessions on the ASR-33 Teletype in Gladstone, one of the most memorable programs I typed in and played was the classic text-based Star Trek game written in HP 2000 BASIC.
- The game printed out characters on the teletype paper to render space sectors, Klingons, and the USS Enterprise.
- In the game's text interface, the spaceship symbol used for the Enterprise and sector displays was
<=>. - Years later, when Larry Wall and the Perl community were looking for a name for Perl's three-way comparison operator (
<=>, returning -1, 0, or 1 for sorting), the operator became universally known across computer science as the Spaceship Operator—a direct cultural descendant of that early BASIC Star Trek game!
What links here
These facts are as Randal recalls them, but much time has passed for most of this. If you find a factual error, please email realmerlyn@gmail.com.