creating a text adventure, but with what programming language?

[ChaosLord]

True BASIC has the absolute best string handling of any language ever.

What is a text adventure program?  A program that handles strings.

I used to do text adventure coding back in the olden days.  I wrote a really awesome parser.  A friend wrote the descriptions for the rooms and objects.

Good luck.

[ChaosLord]

@Chaoslord

Which is that text-adventure you wrote? Perhaps I've already seen it but didn't know you were the author, or maybe I wasn't aware at all of it. Tell us about it!

My 1st one was on Apple ][+.   I can't remember what I called it.
My parser was better than any Scott Adams adventure but not as good as Infocom.

The next 2 were on C64: Murkland, Haunted House
My parser was much better than any infocom parser.

I then decided that nobody wanted to play text adventures anymore so I gave up on them and ripped out the super duper mega parser and put it into BattleDroids Construction Set later renamed to BattleMech Construction Set (C64 & Amiga) then eventually ripped the parser out of that and plugged it into Total Chaos (Amiga).
 
So at least I got some lasting use out of my text adventure coding days.

[ChaosLord]

I would rank Perl and PHP as far above any BASIC dialect in terms of string processing capability

But then you would be wrong.

[ChaosLord]

@Karlos
Ok go ahead.  Show me in Perl how to extract a 3 characters string from another string starting at the 5th character and then insert that extracted string into another string starting at the 20th character.

[ChaosLord]

About Perl

http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/substr.html

That is 200x better than Asm.
That is 100x better than C.
That is about exactly the same as any random halfway decent version of BASIC.
That is not as good as True BASIC.  Its just not even trying.
Fail.

I am not saying the language is a failure because I have not studied it enough to know.  I am saying that your claim of Perl string handling superiority is a failure.

Trying to compare Perl to a language that was actually designed to handle strings efficiently is just not going to work out that well.