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Issue 21.1 ('Xojo Eliza')
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FEATURE

Xojo Eliza

Porting a 50-year-old BASIC program to Xojo

Issue: 21.1 (January/February 2023)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Author Bio: Marc taught himself programming in high school when he bought his first computer but had no money for software. He's had fun learning ever since.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 42,992
Starting Page Number: 36
Article Number: 21105
Resource File(s):

Download Icon project21105.zip Updated: 2023-01-03 09:08:58

Related Link(s): None

Excerpt of article text...

Unless you've been living under a rock in the Antarctic, you've heard of ChatGPT, a new machine learning conversationalist that is causing all sorts of controversy (https://tidbits.com/2022/12/09/chatgpt-the-future-of-ai-is-here/). I've been absorbed by World Cup Fever and even I heard about ChatGPT!

Of course, being the ancient being that I am, I immediately thought of Eliza, the original "psychiatrist" conversation program written in BASIC.

Eliza is hilariously primitive compared to ChatGPT, and even ChatGPT is far from perfect—though both can produce eerily appropriate phrases at times that can make you believe there's a real person at the other end.

Since I've been wanting to cover some retro BASIC programs in xDev for a while, what better opportunity to convert Eliza to Xojo?

The Original Code

A search online quickly found me a version of Eliza in BASIC. (I could have scanned a copy from an old book or magazine of mine, but why bother?) The modification date is 1979—so this isn't the original-original code (which was written in the 1960s), but it's old enough for our purposes. (See Code Listing #1 for the source.)

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