I feel that this specific debate is now out from this (Inform 6) category and into General design discussion: I suggest to move this debate on actions there…
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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Holy mackeral. How could such a simple statement get so distorted and taken out of context and turned around to mean something completely different? I just made the simple observation that Grahame made some very strange design decisions. He has admitted this himself at various times. I am not the first to say so. It comes up time and time again, both here and elsewhere and has done so for the last 20 or 30 years.
And now I’m accused of hating Inform 6, hating every other language out there, get told that I’m free to pick another toolset or write my own library.
Crikey, I just want to write adventures. I don’t want to spend all my time writing yet another language or yet another authoring tool or yet another compiler or yet another library.
For me, Inform 6 is my language of choice. We have a love/hate relationship, but I still use it. I’ve been using it for years and I know all its warts. I use it because of its popularity, its versatility and the fantastic range of z-code interpreters out there that support just about every platform you can think of. Why would I change?
It doesn’t alter the fact that I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time customising the existing grammar for each game and writing custom actions to work around the strange design decisions that I alluded to. I’m sure every author does the same thing.
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I don’t believe he thinks it’s bad, just behaves differently than expected. As Zarf said, this is intentional because it’s easier to expand library functions than restricting it. Fixing standard library behavior is “working on your game” so I don’t see why you have that negative POV. At least, you seem to push people away from Inform unnecessarily.
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Yep. Me, too. That’s normal behavior.
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—Wondering whatever happened to that little balloon he let fly about something funny and quirky he saw in a fun game he was playing, Rovarsson decides to go and look where it may have flown off to.—
----After poking his head above the hillridge, he slinks off again, surprised at the amount of hubbub caused by his little fun balloon.----
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Mah. I don’t critique or hate I6 or Graham Nelson, I only give my philosophical, so to speak, approach on IF.
Elsewhere I pointed on strengths and weakness of the various languages and libraries. this descend from my coding philosophy: first I determine the best language for the problem, then code in that language.
if the design needs NPCs, TADS3 is the best language, if needs unusual parsing, ALAN, if has a “theatrical” narrative flow, Inform 7, And so on… In this context, Inform 6 (and 5) is the “C language”; if I don’t need some specific forte of some other IF language, Inform 6, even 5, is the best one.
so, I can’t be harsh on Nelson on his choice as no one should be harsh on Kernigan and Ritchie…
hope to have clarified again, and
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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That reminds me of how I thought that creating a minimalist I7 implementation of every word in the XKCD ten hundred most commonly used words would be an interesting exercise and possibly even be a valuable basis for a library for producing more lifelike games.
Then I looked at the word list and realized it would would have been a surprisingly large amount of work and wouldn’t be all that useful for authors anyway.
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Nathan, Zarf happens to have collated what one can term a minimal but effective set of parser verbs in his “IF cheat sheet” (actually, a generic IF quick reference sheet…)
I think that a minimalist but effective parser dictionary ought to implement all the verbs in said two-page quick reference sheet…
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
Oh, I disagree entirely! That card is intended as a set of examples of verbs that might work in some game.
(We’re looking at http://pr-if.org/doc/play-if-card/ here.)
The upper section (EXAMINE, TAKE, DROP, OPEN, PUT, PUSH, PULL, TURN, FEEL) could reasonably be taken as a minimal verb set for a parser. But the lower section is not minimal at all. In fact it includes several verbs that are not in the I7 standard rules.
Part of the process of becoming familiar with IF is understanding what verbs are implied by the scenario, and trying them. The card is an attempt to spur your imagination in that regard.
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