Computer programmer and Minecraft player Seth Bling just did the most meta scheme by creating an interpreter that allows players to write their own BASIC codes inside Minecraft using the on-screen keyboard. Bling used vanilla Minecraft to achieve this and shared his mod, uploading a video Jan.16 to explain how it works.
Now Minecraft is not just involved in teaching kids and other users how to code by interacting with the in-game environment, they can actually write their own codes within the game too!
Bling's Mod is not just a simple tool in which one writes BASIC codes and waits for the result to show up in the text dialog. The Mod can directly control logo-like turtles to do the programmer's bidding. That is, if you write the right BASIC code. What's more impressive is that it runs on command blocks that Bling wrote himself. Check it out below.
As he explained, his interpreter Mod is slow not just for the fact that it's an interpreter but also because it runs on command blocks using Minecraft's own system, which only runs on a 20 Hertz clock. It does a computation every 20 seconds so just getting the program to do a simple "print" command of a single character will take 20 seconds of waiting.
To put it simply, as an interpreter, the Mod already takes its time by using every single instruction as input, going line by line and breaking down complex parts into simpler commands before actually executing an instruction. Errors in coding will also be displayed as it reads and interprets an instruction, so if your interpreter comes across an error, it will immediately stop and notify you. So, if you have 10 instructions in your code and you forgot your semi-colon in three instructions, you would have to keep editing and running the interpreter to be able to find all of them. It's different from a compiler which will immediately tell you where all your errors are in one go.
On the bright side, it runs well enough to interpret basic codes such as his prime numbers program so it's a good exercise for those who are only beginning to learn coding.
We think Bling's two weeks of hard work paid off since it was executed nicely and the many people who watched his YouTube video complimented his efforts. You can download the Mod in his website.
