For several years the one goal of the Inform project was to reach open-sourcing of the compiler and other tools, and it was hard to look ahead beyond that. But in the three months since Inform opened up, we’ve now had time to do some planning. I gave a talk about that at the IFTF’s Narrascope III conference on Saturday evening, and thought it might be helpful to follow up with a couple of links here.
The inform7.com website is currently migrating to Github and will be disrupted for a few days, but I wanted to make the text and slides from the talk available now, so with apologies for the odd-looking URL:
There are a few announcements of a dull adminstrative sort, but then ten proposals for changes to the Inform language, including one really large extension (“Dialogue”). Among other things, the talk introduces a new Github repository for those proposals:
And this repository is now open to public browsing, for anybody interested.
Some proposals will naturally arise out of authoring topics as authors inquire about things that are not yet possible. Others will start out as direct feature requests and would better fit in the technical development category. We may decide to add a sub-category in the future.
The dialogue proposal is fascinating; I’m sure I’m not alone in having speculated about what sort of system should be included by default (if one were to be added in the future) but hadn’t considered modifying the syntax like this.