Lists and Lists - Interactive Scheme Tutorial Analysis

This project contains files for analyzing and presenting Andrew Plotkin's 1996 interactive fiction game "Lists and Lists", which teaches Scheme programming through an interactive narrative.

Project Structure

.
├── Makefile           # Automation for fetching and analyzing the game
├── README.md          # This file
├── lists.z5           # The compiled Z-machine game file
├── analysis.txt       # Generated analysis of the game file
└── listsdir/          # Extracted source code directory
    ├── lists.inf            # Main game source
    ├── lists-manual.inf     # In-game Scheme manual
    ├── zlisp-core.inf       # Scheme interpreter core
    ├── zlisp-funs.inf       # Scheme interpreter functions
    ├── zlisp.inf            # Simple execution shell
    └── readme              # Original readme file

About the Game

"Lists and Lists" is an interactive fiction game created by Andrew Plotkin in 1996. It serves as a tutorial for Scheme programming (a dialect of Lisp) by placing the player in an interactive narrative where they learn programming concepts from a genie character.

The game features:

1. A fully functional Scheme interpreter embedded in the Z-machine
2. A comprehensive manual explaining Scheme concepts
3. Programming puzzles with increasing complexity
4. A narrative framework that guides the learning process

Key Features to Highlight in Presentation

Scheme Implementation

The game implements a subset of Scheme within the Z-machine, demonstrating:

• Tokenizing and parsing
• Memory management with garbage collection
• Function evaluation
• Lexical scoping
• List manipulation primitives

Educational Approach

The tutorial covers:

• Basic syntax and semantics of Scheme
• Atoms and lists as fundamental data structures
• Function definition and application
• Recursion
• Scope and environment concepts

How to Use This Repository

1. Run make fetch-game to download the game file
2. Run make fetch-source to download the source code
3. Run make extract-source to extract the source files
4. Run make analyze to generate analysis of the game file
5. Run make inspect to view the analysis
6. Run make run to play the game

Z-Machine Technical Details

The Z-machine is a virtual machine developed by Infocom for text adventure games. It features:

• Portable bytecode format
• Text compression
• Object-oriented programming system
• Virtual memory management

This game is implemented as a Z-code version 5 (Z5) file.

Credits

• Game created by Andrew Plotkin (1996)
• Source code available at the IF Archive
• Frotz interpreter used to run the game