ā Most of Infocom's games were written in āZork Implementation Language,ā which was native to no particular platform or processor, but ready to be interpreted on all kinds of systems by versions of its Z-Machine. The Z-Machine could be considered the first real game development engine, so long as nobody fact-checks that statement too hard.ā
A very cringy article where someone who doesnāt really know about pseudo-code thinks ZIL was novel.
Donald Knute wrote some of the earliest pseudocode for his books on Computer Science, decades before Infocom existed.
P-Code was what the Pascal compiler compiled down to. I wrote a compiler and linker for an IBM 360 (punched cards, no less) that ran pseudocode. Again, about five years before Infocom was a wet dream.
Pseudocode isnāt complex or difficult, but I can see how many today might see it as novel. Nor is it a āvirtual machineā as they emulate real devices.
I told you itās cringy.
Even Plotkin's blog post is iffy. Bummer.