Seeing as how we've discussed a size measurement for Minecraft redstone creations, I thought I'd follow that up with establishing standard output and input methods.
Minecraft, obviously, does not have STDIN or STDOUT in the traditional sense. So how exactly should we handle input and output for Minecraft redstone "programs?" What methods should be considered standard?
This is probably the most obvious output method, since it outputs as text to chat. As a bonus, /say (but not /tellraw) would also output to "real" STDOUT on a server.
Since /say outputs a [@] before the text, we should probably use similar rules to this to determine when /say is allowed (as opposed to /tellraw).
@ player does the /say command.
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Nov 16, 2015 at 18:37
/say is prepended with [@] (note the space), so, depending on the OPs choice, it may not be valid output. In the chat log, it's prepended with [current time] [@] .
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Nov 16, 2015 at 18:40
/gamerule CommandBlockOutput false or something like that, though that is a byte-waster. Perhaps this can be an assumed state?
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Nov 16, 2015 at 18:44
[@] is still the player that executes /say.
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Nov 16, 2015 at 18:44
Consider a pure redstone mechanism. Using a Command Block would eat a good deal of bytes; I agree that, when explicitly said, STDOUT is what quartata suggested in his answer. When otherwise not stated, it may be easier to output using Redstone Lamps, if all you need to output is a truthy/fasly value. Thus, an on-state redstone lamp could be truthy, and an off-state could be a falsy value.
This is the obvious, simple solution for pure-redstone answers. Encode the input into binary, and input it with levers. Bit order (most significant first or least significant first) and the translation between bits and lever positions (e.g. 0 = up, 1 = down, or vice-versa) would be individually specified by the answer. Since levers can only be placed on the sides of blocks, a free (as in, not counting towards the score of the program) block with a single lever mounted on it for each bit of input seems appropriate.
So it actually is possible to get textual input in minecraft, though you couldnt do much with it. WARNING: THE FOLLOWING IS COMPLEX.
Lets start with the actual string input. This can be achieved through a simple keyboard tellraw command (like the one in this video). Each key can be linked to a trigger objective where the key determines the value of the score in that objective. Command blocks would then determine what key it is, and summon an entity with that name at a certain position. The system would then detect an entity there, and move it over by one block. This repeats, moving each entity over by one block until a row of "character" entities is made. Next, to use this information, you can issue specific testfors and executes to determine the string.
In this case, a command could be /execute @e[0,0,0,r=0,type=Chicken,name=A] ~ ~ ~1 execute @e[r=0,type=Chicken,name=B] ~ ~ ~1 execute @e[r=0,type=Chicken,name=e] ~ ~ ~1 execute @e[r=0,type=Chicken,name=2] ~ ~ ~ say TRUE, for example.
Create a tellraw keyboard that spawns in an entity chain, adding to the chain in each click, and perform execute commands to test string qualities.
Note: If this answer gets enough votes I will make a fully working example system to prove this concept.
