Hacker News Reader

On the subject of IF, programming language geeks should all check out Inform 7 - Graham Nelson's programming tool for creating text-based games that run on the Infocom Z-machine (and other related formats). There are a large number of truly astonishing things about the language, compiler and development environment. For example:

- the text editor supports elastic tabstops

- its documentation is embedded right into the development environment, beautifully complete and well written, and filled with great little examples

- compilation error messages are delightfuly detailed, specific, and useful. But if the same error is repeated, the compiler usually tells you "again, this doesn't make sense" rather than hitting you with a wall of repetition.

- many of the language's tools are for creating new language syntaxes for you to write your program with, rather than for the player to use in the game. You can create your own nouns, verbs, adjectives and prepositions to use in your descriptions of the world.

- Its relationships system is very powerful, and includes first-class support for performing operations on the graphs defined by relationships. For example, rooms are related by adjacency, and you can enquire what room is 'the next step via the adjacency relation' from one room towards another to have characters navigate towards a goal - but equally you can create our own relationships and perform similar operations on those.

- in spite of the syntactic restrictions of trying to 'read like English', it surfaces surprisingly rich functional and generics syntaxes; there's a real, grown-up programming language in there.

It is definitely worth a weekend play, if you're looking for a completely different kind of language for a change.

View on HN

A room has a number called grue counter. The grue counter of a room is usually 0. A room can be grue infested. A room is usually not grue infested. Every turn while the player is in a grue infested room: Increase the grue counter of the location by one. The dungeon is a room. "You stand in a basic medieval dungeon." The dungeon is grue infested. The first time the player enters the dungeon: try looking; say "It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue." Grue lunch is a scene. Grue lunch begins when the grue counter of the dungeon is greater than 10. When grue lunch begins: say "A large, smelly, foul tempered creature resembling a cross between a troll and an orc lumbers out from one of the open passageways. It sniffs the air, catches your scent, and looses a mighty roar! Before you are able to do anything else, it quickly lunges forward, chomping down on your head with a sickening [bold type]*crunch*" ; end the story saying "You have been eaten by a grue."