This has been the BBC response to criticism of its news reporting for a long time now.
However there are very few debates which have only two points of view, and the very act of reducing every issue to a "both sides" argument is a real problem for the BBC (well, for me anyway!)
No, AFAIK MS-DOS always initialises it to zero before starting the program. I'm trying to find a better reference, but I think this[0] effectively explains what state the registers are in on entry to your program.
Edit: I take that back. According to [1]:
.COM-format executables begin running with the following register values:
AL = 00h if first FCB has valid drive letter, FFh if not
AH = 00h if second FCB has valid drive letter, FFh if not
The value of BX is however strictly undefined, but practically always 0. Potentially some DOS will load this register with a different value, but probably no version of MS-DOS.
On x86, some instructions are longer than others. Incrementing is a single byte. Setting the value 1 if you don’t assume anything is going to be 2 bytes (al, ah, bl, etc.) or 4 bytes for (ax, bx, etc.)
It goes in cycles. If there's a good article from a new or irregular (for HN) site, you'll see a lot more articles from thast site show up on the frontpage.
Zork was implemented in a dialect of LISP called "MDL" aka "MIT Design Language" aka "Muddle" [1], which ZIL was based on.
Here's the original MDL source code, that people should study in school, which reads like an epic poem about heroic adventures such as Beowulf! [2]
I'd love for some academic egghead literary critic type to deconstruct [3] the Zork MDL source code, like Chaim Gingold deconstructed SimCity for their PhD thesis. [4]
This has been the BBC response to criticism of its news reporting for a long time now.
However there are very few debates which have only two points of view, and the very act of reducing every issue to a "both sides" argument is a real problem for the BBC (well, for me anyway!)