I discovered Inform 7 last year and was impressed at the sophisticated platform it provides for writing interactive fiction in semi-natural English. In the 1980s there were plenty of books about writing text adventure games (as they were more widely called then) on home microcomputers, and I learned a lot about programming Acorn computers from Peter Killworth's "How To Write Adventure Games for the BBC Microcomputer Model B and Acorn Electron". So to give Inform 7 a try, I implemented the mini four-room adventure from that book, and wrote a walk-through of how to do it quite neatly with the building blocks of Inform 7 here in case anyone's interested: <a href="https://www.eclecticstacks.com/post/mini-adventure-in-inform-7/" rel="nofollow">https://www.eclecticstacks.com/post/mini-adventure-in-inform...</a>
I had the pleasure of being taught mathematics by the creator of Inform, Graham Nelson, at Oxford (and Oxford class sizes are _small_, 2-5 students). He’s a super interesting guy - created Inform, teaches pure mathematics at the highest level, but seems to most enjoy writing poetry.
As I posted about 4 months ago on "The Futures of Inform" <<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32571293" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32571293</a>>:<p>The "Inform 7 Programmer's Manual" by Ron Newcomb explains Inform 7 from the point-of-view of someone who knows how to program in other languages.
Version as of August 15, 2011: <a href="http://www.plover.net/~pscion/Inform%207%20for%20Programmers" rel="nofollow">http://www.plover.net/~pscion/Inform%207%20for%20Programmers</a>...<p>An older 2009 version (if PDF is a problem): <a href="http://www.plover.net/~pscion/inform7.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.plover.net/~pscion/inform7.html</a>
Inform 7 code is interesting from a conceptual perspective —- <i>“How could we build a programming language that looked like natural language?”</i><p>In practice though, I think it ultimately falls into some kind of uncanny valley, where it’s just enough like natural language that it seems like a certain sentence or grammatical construction should work, but it doesn’t.
Inform7 it's cool but the generated adventures are 'huge' and the might run slow on m68k based machines. If you like oop (much easier than Python, even a kid from Elementary could understand the basic syntax) and supporting legacy machines, inform6 is still maintained. IBG.pdf for an introduction to if6 and DM4 for mid-high complex stuff such as writting libraries and setting up non-standard objects with twisted grammars.
Related:<p><i>Inform: A Language for Interactive Fiction</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9279639" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9279639</a> - March 2015 (50 comments)<p><i>Inform 7: An adventure game programming system based on natural language</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=134541" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=134541</a> - March 2008 (1 comment)
Related comment from yesterday's thread about the Ink language:
"Inform7 internally works like a very primitive rules engine..."<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34081090" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34081090</a>
Does anyone have any experience integrating Inform into something like a C++ based game as a rules engine to add emergent complexity for objects/interactions/dialog?