inform 7 practice exercises?

[neroden (Nathanael Nerode)]

I think literally everything I’ve ever tried to do when writing interactive fiction has almost immediately involved trying to make it parse something unusual. Inform 7 is actually much better about this than any language I’ve ever worked with before, but you wouldn’t know it from the intro manual. (The pronouns are a real bear, though. I think there’s a way to rewrite the internals to still work for multiple languages, still be pretty fast, and make more sense, but it requires getting rid of some very odd embedded bit-twiddling assumptions.)

" As opposed to my standard learning curve for programming languages like Javascript and Ruby, which is Read intro manual–>intro manual is a bunch of crashingly obvious stuff mixed with stuff that makes no sense and after three chapters manual hasn’t taught me how to do anything that the language is designed to do, as opposed to “99 Bottles of Beer” stuff that’s better suited to BASIC–>forget it. "
Funny, that was my exact experience with “Writing with Inform”. Which didn’t surprise me because I always find intro manuals useless (though I know other people find them useful); my style is to skip forward to the reference manual. The problem was that there was no actual reference manual (and still isn’t).

Writing a reference manual by hand is a lot of work. But writing the basic outline of how a source file works – what goes in declarative context, what goes in procedural context, the outline of a source file for an extension and for a game – is not such hard work.

After that, the long catalog of possible statements ought to be auto-extractable from a supposedly “literate programming” source. Now, I’m just figuring out that a lot of this is actually done by NI when it generates the Index for a program. But for some reason this has never been converted into a manual, nor is it remotely obvious that the way to get the reference listings is to write a blank program and compile it. (??? – this would be considered an extremely unfair puzzle if it were put in an IF game) On top of that, several crucial points are undocumented (I now want to add some documentation into English Language to explain “regarding”).

[mikegentry]

@neroden

Now, I’m just figuring out that a lot of this is actually done by NI when it generates the Index for a program. But for some reason this has never been converted into a manual, nor is it remotely obvious that the way to get the reference listings is to write a blank program and compile it. (??? – this would be considered an extremely unfair puzzle if it were put in an IF game) On top of that, several crucial points are undocumented (I now want to add some documentation into English Language to explain “regarding”).

I’ve often thought (and maybe even said once or twice) that the Index itself is one of the most indispensable tools for learning Inform, and that this is not stressed nearly enough in the manual.

I enjoyed reading the manual straight through, and fortunately it just happens to be written in a way that speaks to my own particular way of learning things. But it is a very particular way of learning things. You are not the only person to lodge this sort of complaint against the documentation, for what it’s worth. It’s a reasonable complaint, I think, though unfortunately it has no good answers that don’t rely on either your own industry or someone else’s time and generosity.

[HanonO (Hanon Ondricek)]

The index is invaluable, and you can search for phrases and things in the documentation once you kind of know what you’re looking for.

You’ve been talking about the “intro” manual, but have you perused the recipe book at all? It’s more of a “here’s a bunch of things people might want to do and methods of accomplishing them” type of reference that teaches by example.