Re: Randomise spawning apples in snake.el

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> This is my first quick modification to emacs.  I hope I've produced the
> .diff correctly, if not, please yell at me for not correctly  reading the
> submission guidelines. (Also: I apologise if this is not  the correct place
> to submit patches - I didn't see anything about code  submission on
> savannah. Please advise if necessary.)

> The modification changes snake.el so that new apples will be spawned at
> random locations rather than being deposited behind the snake.  I  intended
> to govern the spawn rate based on score, however, since the  game speed
> increases I decided this was unnecessary.

This looks like an acceptable improvement, but the patch needs a few
tweaks: your new spawn-rate variable seems to be a customization
variable, which is never set directly by the game, so it should be
declared with defcustom and should not be made-variable-buffer-local.
Of course, maybe it doesn't deserve a customization (after all, 5 was
hardcoded before), in which case the `defvar' is fine (but the
make-variable-buffer-local is not).

Also, I'm not sure why it defaults to 10, where the current code seems
to use 5 for the same purpose.

Finally, it'd be good to make it so that the current behavior can be
preserved (under the constrol of a customization variable, or some
argument when starting the game, or ...).


        Stefan