Comment by verytrivial | Hacker News Reader

Comment by verytrivial | Hacker News Reader

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Another worthy mention in this space is Linus Åkesson's dialog language[1]. From its description:

    Dialog is a domain-specific language for creating works of interactive fiction. It is heavily inspired by Inform 7 (Graham Nelson et al. 2006) and Prolog (Alain Colmerauer et al. 1972).
    An optimizing compiler, dialogc, translates high-level Dialog code into Z-code, a platform-independent runtime format originally created by Infocom in 1979.

Development seems dormant at the moment, but it feels more like Inform 7 'done right' to me. If my brain was a little bigger and calmer I'd be all over it. It has excellent documentation too. Very portable -- I compiled it locally under Termux on my phone with nothing but Clang.

[1] https://www.linusakesson.net/dialog/index.php

There has been some Dialog development in the last year or so, after others picked it up (with Linus' blessing) and started work on a Community Edition:

https://github.com/Dialog-IF/dialog

Author here. I agree. It does seem like "Inform 7 done right" and I really like the Prolog evaluation model.

I didn't know about Dialog when I wrote this article (learned of it just yesterday!) but unless life gets in the way I will explore it in a future article.

While poking around I found this side-by-side comparison of Inform 7 & Dialog. Seems instructive.

https://www.linusakesson.net/dialog/craverly/craverly_side_b...

https://www.linusakesson.net/dialog/craverly/index.php

This is great illustration of the brilliance of Inform 7.

I understand the appeal of Dialog -- Inform 7 can be really awkward for traditional programming constructs -- but I think I'd rather write ZIL if I'm going back to the usual control structures and OOP-style messaging.

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