One of the changes made in the upcoming version of Inform 7 is the consolidation of indexed text and text into one. This seems reasonable, and I had always wondered why the two were treated as separate entities in the first place. Is there a disadvantage to combining the two? Why wasn’t this done sooner?
Previously text was stored in ROM. As most text didn’t need the functionality of indexed text this saved a lot of RAM, which is especially important for the Z-Machine. The new implementation will I think put 2-4 bytes per text in RAM (a pointer to ROM) until you edit a text when it will take more space. We’ll gain a lot more flexibility at the cost of some extra RAM usage and a slight performance decrease (as all text reads will need to check if they’ve been overridden.) Z5 is probably close to unusable now.
Would it be possible to add a Use option to turn off indexed text altogether, if people wanted to compile for the Z-machine and didn’t need regular expressions and such?