Child Loops

Sometimes you want to write a command with its own Command Loop. Imagine we have a unit that performs two complicated commands, find_treasure and fight_monster. find_treasure might need to navigate an area, locate items of interest, interact with them,then return to home_base to deposit them. fight_monster could require commands like evade, attack, hide, and flee.

Combining all of this in a single command loop would give us a lot of commands, many of which are mostly unrelated, and managing our switches could get very complicated. However, making them entirely separate isn't ideal either, as there's probably some common functionality between them (die if our health gets too low, respawn if we get stuck). We also need to switch between the two commands.

A good way to manage this is by making find_treasure and fight_monster child loops rather than regular commands. We can treat them like regular commands in our main loop, but when we switch to them they'll be able to perform more sophisticated logic than a normal command could. In addition, our main loop will continue to run along side the the child loop, so we can quickly switch out of the child loop with a big switch arrow ==> in response to certain conditions, without either loop needing to worry about higher level concerns.

Our main loop could look something like this:

loop find_treasure:
  # Our treasure logic goes here. This loop doesn't have
  # an exit condition.
  if treasure_found:
    # We found it. Start looking again. This will switch
    # from any command apart from `look_for_chest`.
    others ==> look_for_chest

loop fight_monster:
  # Fight logic here. This loop should exit when the
  # monster dies.
  if monster.dead:
    any ==> nil

loop:
  # We want our unit to find_treasure indefinately.
  # `find_treasure` doesn't exit (switch to nil).
  nil -> find_treasure
  if monster.near:
    # find_treasure doesn't need to know anything about
    # monsters. We can break out of it with a big switch
    # arrow if we encounter one.
    find_treasure ==> fight_monster

  # fight_monster does have an exit condition (the monster
  # dies), so we can wait for it to finish using the little
  # switch arrow, then go back to finding treasure.
  fight_monster -> find_treasure

  if health == 0:
    # if our health drops to 0, it doesn't matter what else
    # we're doing. Die immediately. Break out of any
    # command (except die) with a big switch arrow.
    (any, -die) ==> die

    # this would also work:
    # others ==> die

  if stuck:
    # respawn if we're stuck, but only from our two child
    # loops. We don't want to respawn if we're already
    # respawning, or we're dead. Implementation of
    # `respawn` not shown.
    (find_treasure, fight_monster) ==> respawn

  # we're done respawning. Treasure time!
  respawn -> find_treasure

Child loops can also call other child loops, in which case both the parent and grandparent loops can use ==> to break out of the top level loop. There's no limit to nesting depth.