Dialogo's toolchain is based on Dialog

Hi! After translating the standard library in Italian, I’m developing a parser that takes sentences in “controlled italian” and translates them in Dialog source code.

For example:
the sentence “la mela è un oggetto commestibile nella scatola” (that is: “the apple is an edible thing in the box”)
becomes:
#mela
(item *)
(edibile *)
( * is #in #scatola)

The project is in an early stage, but the idea seems interesting (at least for italian authors).
You can find it here: GitHub - YouDevIt/Dialogo: Il linguaggio in "italiano controllato" per creare avventure testuali in italiano

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Awesome, kind of like what Inform 7 is to Inform 6 in a way. Very interesting, the same approach should be possible for English, of course (Inform 7 has shown pseudo-natural English coding for IF is possible after all), but also might open up Dialog to other languages (my pet project a while back was translating Dialog into Japanese, but I ran into issues; maybe this is a better approach for Japanese IF authoring?).

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Also I am very curious to see if you tackle rules with more than just heads and printed text, and if so how!

Well, I’m trying this approach because in Inform7 6L* there was support for other languages also in source code (with a syntax similar to the one I use in “Dialogo”) but in 6M62 it’s not available any more. After years waiting for a new release of Inform7, I discovered Dialog that is very interesting. Something like Dialogo in English may be not useful since there is already Inform7.

That is the next hard step. I’m planning it right now.

Leonardo, because the source are around, I think is a good step ahead, but I prefer using separate NL and story content language… this help in a visual checking of what is what (in IF development, code and assets are intertwined)

I’m curious if you will give a NL “translation” of I7, when the OS sources will be finally released (for me the ideal IF NL environment is Italian NL for english-language WIP and english NL for italian-language WIP)

So, I’ll watch the developments of your initiative. Avanti così !

Saluti,/best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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