Hash tables in I7

[Zed (Zed Lopez)]

@aschultz

You forget if it’s “of” and “in” when looking for a list element.

I fixed that. As of 10.1, all of from, in, or of work interchangeably in (nearly) all the list and table phrases/syntax.

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

@Zed

As of 10.1, all of from, in, or of work interchangeably in (nearly) all the list and table phrases/syntax.

Oh thank God. Even as someone who, per the above, usually does pretty well with the only-this-particular-syntax-will-work stuff in Inform, the persnicketyness around prepositions in table functions always manages to wrong-foot me.

[jbg]

@tmack

Thanks, I’ll take a look at it. (And, in fact, I did code up a poker hand evaluator in I6 a while back, albeit with a different implementation. It was…fine.)

Yeah, I could see how you’d implement a hand evaluator in I7 procedurally, but with tables you just have to do a couple multiplications and two lookups, which is fast, even in an IF VM.

And because I wanted to extend the poker-playing stuff to general NPC AI decisionmaking, lack of hash tables was a dealbreaker for the project.

[Angstsmurf (Petter Sjölund)]

@tmack

It does have an intense fear of symbols or standard programming conventions, which I assume is a deliberate design choice to make the system less intimidating to newcomers,

It should perhaps be noted that Inform 7 is not unique in this regard. When it was released 18 years ago, many similar natural-language programming languages such as HyperTalk, AppleScript, Lingo and even COBOL were more popular than today, and some people still saw it as the future of programming.