Good question Maniac. I established in my first post that the starting sector is Stardock. Since the first destination is Terra, the first MSL to be walked will be from SD to Terra.

Now, that may not be the best way to get it done, and you certainly don't have to do it that way. But when you start thinking of ways to shorten a script, creating a word list and iterating over it can make for some very concise code. This was the way that made the most sense to me.

LS, you have a valid point about the ZTM, and I didn't mention it. Assume that the warp data in TWX is complete, and that the TWX database can be queried reliably. So use functions like getCourse and SECTOR.WARPS as often as possible to shave a few lines.

You realize this won't be an useable script. Its just an exercise. So use whatever produces interesting code.

I'm confident that an 11 or 14 line amtrak will be useless outside of this exercise, yes. But the exercise itself is far from useless. I've already learned new insights into TWX scripting... and frankly, I'm surprised. Let me list a few of these.

I think Sing's example of recursion is incredible. His example moves down a target list, $targets, appending to it as it goes. As originally posted, it would mistakenly grid the whole universe, oops, but a brilliant solution. He said, "Just create a list of sectors to grid, then grid them." I said, "That's 2 while loops, too many lines." He said, "I think I can do it in less."

I just realized during this challenge that write, and readToArray can be used to create an array very effectively. Promethius posted an example using this technique.

I've learned that the command 'branch' can be useful for combining nested while loops, possibly. For example, if you have this while structure:You can write it with this functionally equivalent code:
So, you slackers that haven't given this a shot yet, jump on in, and learn something new.

Nice readToArray trick. With that, can we get (in 2.05) a way to populate an array from a line? setVar $array[] (1,2,3,4,5,6), for instance?