The DM4, as many have noted, is out-of-date with respect to changes in the language and standard library. While there are often docs that cover the differences, it’s difficult switch back and forth between them, and for some things, there is no canonical reference outside of the source code.
Does anyone know if the DM4 was ever released under an open-source license? And, if so, Is there source for it?
(I ask because I’ve been updating a personal version of Roger Firth’s old, but still excellent, reference cards for Inform6 and the standard library. Some of the changes to I6/lib that I’ve noticed are more than what would be on a reference card, so I was thinking that I could similarly produce a “DM4.1”)
The manual is not open-source (or creative commons). There is no plan to change the licensing.
My (personal) feeling is that the book is both a historical document and a testament to Graham’s writing style. It would not benefit from being updated piecemeal.
Someone could write new reference documentation. It wouldn’t look much like the DM4, which is a combination of lesson plan and indexed description of both the Inform 6 language and its standard library.
That’s quite a shame.
There a few broken-as-described pieces in the main docs, but the bulk of updates are more likely to be in the tables/appendices, which don’t have nearly the same as-Graham-wrote tone, and were intended as referential, I expect, when written.
“You can write your own” is a really high bar. Particularly with things like https://radiogoddess.github.io/inform6-dm4-remix/sa2.html, that ends up being either “here’s a doc that lists only the new things, and you still have to straddle multiple docs for the whole list” or “you need to write all of the existing stuff from scratch as well, since the original isn’t under an open-source license.”
(I guess I’m saying that, as someone trying to use this tech, piecemeal updates to the appendices would be very beneficial)
Yeah, it’s definitely an unfortunate situation! We’ve made sure the Dialog documentation is under the same license as the rest of it, just in case of something like this.
If it’s any consolation, though, I don’t think there’s any real moral or legal issues with publishing your own version of the appendices. The lessons in the manual themselves show Graham’s voice and artistic expression, but a basic table of data doesn’t really—I don’t think he, or much of anyone, is especially concerned about you reproducing and updating “=, precedence level 1, infix, right-associative”.
The Dialog documentation is very nice, btw; I’ve been on-and-off going through it recently.
The docs and the live update/debugging are the things that are interesting me in the possibility of Dialog as an engine for a next project (but Inform6 is still very much in the running, but this time, with the standard library)
It’s quite a coincidence that you brought this up, since I’ve been working on freely licensed documentation for the Inform language, compiler, and standard library. It’s still a work in progress, but since the topic has come up, I’ve added the initial chapters into git, here: Public Git Repositories - inform-guide.git/summary.
@jxself ! This is very exciting. I took a peek at it and it looks promising. 