We’ve seen free-form (mostly) game Minecraft do a lot of things: Teach chemistry, accept and make phone calls, work in virtual reality or on a Raspberry Pi. But this might have all of the others beaten.
YouTube user SethBling has gone and created a way for users to write and execute BASIC code inside the Minecraft environment.For those of you who don’t remember BASIC, it used to be taught in South African schools to punish those who were thought to be ‘good with computers.’
You won’t use it if you’re riding pigs and shooting arrows at Creepers, of course, but you can actually create the compiler yourself. Or, more accurately, implement Seth’s interpreter in your own game, because he’s done all the hard work.
Once you have you can get basic output from commands and even issue instructions to ‘Turtles’, provided you remember your IF-THEN commands well enough. Just don’t go expecting anything too fancy, as Minecraft limits your fledgling program to a 20Hz speed. This is a limitation in Minecraft of 20 operations per second so while you could theoretically program something extensive, it’s going to take ages to run.
Source: SethBling (YouTube) via Engadget