# HG changeset patch
# User Michael Pavone <pavone@retrodev.com>
# Date 1406369890 25200
# Node ID c0b3922646d86ad859afa3a3882554cb4681a2c2
# Parent  8c26981aae8cb068ff7db8c3f610f68829029dd2
Fill in readme

diff -r 8c26981aae8c -r c0b3922646d8 code/README
--- a/code/README	Sat Jul 26 03:17:58 2014 -0700
+++ b/code/README	Sat Jul 26 03:18:10 2014 -0700
@@ -0,0 +1,119 @@
+Team: Rhope Burn
+Language: Quiche
+Members: Michael Pavone, William Morgan
+
+HOW TO BUILD:
+
+To build our Lambda-man AI, you first need to build the lmc compiler. lmc is
+written in a WIP language called Quiche. The steps to get a Quiche toolchain
+setup are as follows:
+
+1) Make a local clone of hg repo: http://rhope.retrodev.com/repos/tabletprog
+2) Make sure the d8 Javascript shell (built from Chrome's v8) is in your path
+   -- see this page for instructions on how to build d8: 
+		https://developers.google.com/v8/build
+3) Install the Boehm GC development package (libgc-dev on Debian derivatives)
+3) Install gcc if it is not already present
+
+Once you have the toolchain in place, navigate to the Quiche repo clone in a
+terminal and execute the following command.
+
+./compile PATH/TO/lmc.tp
+
+If all goes well an executable named lmc will be produced at PATH/TO/lmc. This
+program takes a .lm file as an argument and produces "GCC" assembly code on
+stdout.
+
+ABOUTE QUICHE:
+
+Quiche (previously called TP) is a language I (Michael Pavone) work on in my
+spare time. It draws rather heavily from Smalltalk with a smattering of
+influence from other languages. In theory, it's reason for existence is to be
+a good target for a structured editor on mobile devices. In practice, I'd
+probably be better served targeting an existing language, but that's not nearly
+as much fun.
+
+The current implementation is a quick and dirty bootstrap compiler written in
+Javascript that produces C code. A self-hosted compiler is in progress.
+
+A Quiche program is made up of one or more modules. At runtime, a module is
+just a plain object. Only one module is allowed per source file. The top level
+of a Quiche source file is required to either be an object literal or a lambda
+that returns an object. After all modules used are initialized, execution
+starts in the main method of the main module. Currently, the names of all
+available modules occupy the top level of the symbol table; however, this will
+change in the self-hosted compiler.
+
+QUICHE SYNTAX:
+
+To make reading lmc's code a bit easier, here is a quick primer on Quiche's
+syntax.
+
+line comment: //
+block comment: /* */
+assignment: foo <- bar
+list literal: [1 2 3 4]
+array literal: #[1 2 3 4]
+string literal "foo bar"
+lambda: :arg {
+	arg + 1
+}
+object literal: #{
+	foo <- "blah blah"
+	bar <- :val {
+		foo <- val . " blah"
+	}
+}
+method invokation/function application:
+	someval someFunOrMeth
+	someFunOrMeth: someval
+	some: val1 Fun: val2 OrMeth: val3
+	some:Fun:OrMeth: val1 val2 val3
+operators:
+	+,-,/,* -- basic arithmetic
+	=,!=,>=,<= -- comparison 
+	and,or,xor -- bitwise
+	% -- modulus
+	. -- concatenation
+	| -- cons
+	
+ABOUT LMC:
+
+lmc implements a subset of Quiche for the LamCo General Compute Coprocessor. It
+uses the parser, ast and symbols modules from the work in progress self-hosted
+compiler. Object literals are not supported apart from the top-level object
+that represents the module. That object is used to populate the global
+environment. Closures are properly supported; however, some elements that are
+implemented using closures in the normal Quiche compiler (namely if:else and 
+while:do) are instead implemented as special forms that do not introduce a new
+scope. Array literals are used for producing tuples as the GCC does not really
+support the former and Quiche does not currently support the latter.
+
+Tail call optimization is notcurrently implemented; however, while:do is
+implemented using TSEL so we were able to do without.
+
+LIGHTNING ROUND SOLUTION:
+
+Our lightning round solution is relatively simple. Each step, we do a breadth
+first search for something desirable (pellet, power pellet, fruit or fright
+mode ghost). Cells occupied by normal mode ghosts and their immediate neighbors
+are marked as walls to provide simple avoidance behavior.
+
+We translate the grid to a tree format to provide more efficient lookup. An
+identically dimensioned tree is used for keeping track of visited nodes for our
+search.
+
+This seems to work surprisingly well given how simple it is. I'm a bit
+concerned about our cycle usage when the nearest "good" thing is far away,
+hopefully that will not be an issue.
+
+We noticed that the "undefined" input to main appears to be the ghost code, but
+we did not have time to take advantage of it for the lightning round.
+
+The code for this AI is located in dotScanner.lm
+
+OTHER FILES:
+
+test.lm - random collection of syntax for exercising parts of the compiler
+simple.lm - picks each direction in order every 4 turns
+mike00.lm - test program for developing library functions