"04 - The Wizardry Consulted (b)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cook Rick)

spent weeks dodging wizards in the freezing, deserted City of Night. That
was when Jerry, Danny and some other programmers were brought here from
San Jose to help him. That in turn led to a couple of computer criminals
finding their way to this world and that had ended in another enormous
battle. In between there had been the job of teaching this world's wizards
how to program and months of delicate, wearing negotiations with the
non-humans of the world who were upset by humans' new magical powers. It
had only been in the last few months that teaching and negotiating had
tapered off and Wiz could get back to serious programming.

"Yep," he repeated, taking his eyes away from the landscape. "It's
wonderful."

"You sound as if you're trying to convince yourself." Jerry sounded
amused.

"I'm already convinced," Wiz said firmly. "I'm bored and I like it."

Jerry leaned back in his chair, which squeaked in protest, and put his
ham-like hands behind his head. He was several inches taller than Wiz and
a lot heavier, although he had dropped perhaps forty pounds since coming
to this world a couple of years ago. Even powerful wizards here got more
physical exercise than their software counterparts in Cupertino. Like Wiz
he was tanned, but unlike his friend, who drew his dark hair back in a
shoulder-length ponytail, Jerry's lighter brown hair was neatly trimmed
above his collar. "I'd rather think of it as having enough time to work on
interesting projects. Now that we've got wizards and apprentices trained
in the basics of the magic compiler we've got the time for refinements."

"Speaking of which, what is that you've been hacking on so furiously?"

"Kind of an experiment," Jerry said, turning back to the code. "I'm trying
to see how well the magic compiler works in a more conventional computer
language."

"You're translating the thing into C?"

"Well, no," Jerry said. "I thought I'd try something that was a little
less tied to computer architecture. Something more general."

Wiz looked over his shoulder at the lines of luminescent characters
suspended in midair. Then he squinted and leaned closer.

The magic compiler was written in a combination of this world's runes, the
English alphabet and various made-up symbols. To the uninitiated a spell
listing looked like someone's graphics card had barfed on the screen. But
even compared to that, this listing was strange. In addition to the
"normal" symbols, there were tiny squares, triangles, right angles and
things that were even less comprehensible. Wiz scanned the display several
times, frowning.