Functional Programming with C#

Chapter 13. The Martian Trail

Well folks, our time together is coming to an end shortly. I hope you’re finding this book as rewarding to read as I did to write. Since it’s nearly the proverbial last day of school, I thought we could have a bit of fun to put everything together. This way, I can show you an example of how a complete functional C# application might look.

When I was young, in the days when we still traveled to school on dinosaurs and had mammoth steak for lunch, I learned to program from a series of books on BASIC.¹ These Usborne Publishing books had titles like Computer Battlegames and contained the source code to games you could enter into the computer yourself. They’re all available on the Usborne website if you’re interested. They usually had a sci-fi theme but turned out to be entirely text based and nothing whatsoever like the painted action scene that accompanied them. In that vein, I present to you my own contribution to that rather obscure genre.

I’ve taken inspiration from the 1975 version of Oregon Trail by Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger in HP Time-Shared BASIC. This is just inspired by it, however; none of the original code or text has been used here.

Story

The year is 2147, and humanity has finally reached the planet Mars. Not only have we traveled there, but settlement of the red planet is well underway. New cities, outposts, and trading posts are starting to spring up everywhere.

You and your family are among the latest batch of ...