Introducing the Å-machine

Get version 0.4.1 of the Å-machine toolkit! The archive contains version 0.4 of the specification, and updated versions of the Å-machine toolchain and interpreters. This is a companion release to Dialog version 0j/01.

Release notes:

  • Several improvements and clarifications in the specification document, including an attempt at formalizing the output model.

  • Spans, i.e. inline text segments with style attributes.

  • Support for hyperlinks where the target text is determined from the displayed text.

  • Clear Links opcode to transform old hyperlinks into plain text.

  • Ability to check whether a value is a dictionary word that doesn’t appear in the game dictionary (i.e. is represented internally by a list of characters).

  • Ability to split and join dictionary words.

  • Inhibit whitespace around certain stop characters when they are printed as a value.

  • New runtime error: Invalid output state.

  • Several new opcodes and opcode variants to reduce bytecode footprint.

  • Better text string encoding.

  • The javascript engine now handles extremely long input lines gracefully.

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