An installation of Inform 7

[wh0]

Project URL: https://glitch.com/~inform7

I tried installing a copy of Inform 7 http://inform7.com/, which is a language for writing interactive fiction. The language is based on English, which I’ve never worked with a language like that before, so I found that fascinating. Here are some excerpts from the documentation:

[from 2.2. Making rules]
Inform is built on a mass of several hundred rules, some quite complex, and it could even be said that Inform is that mass of rules. We never see the complexity behind the scenes because the whole aim is to provide a basic, penny-plain, vanilla flavoured sort of realism. It would be surprising if one could put the crate inside itself, so a rule exists to forbid this. It would be surprising if one could drop something which was already on the ground, and so on. These basic rules of realism are the ones which every new Inform project starts with.

[from 2.16 Does Inform really understand English?]
More philosophically, to “understand” involves contextual knowledge. Just because Inform recognises and acts on a sentence, does it really understand what we meant? It will turn out that Inform is both good and bad at this. For instance, from

Mr Darcy wears a top hat.

Inform will correctly deduce that Darcy is a person, because inanimate objects do not ordinarily wear clothes, and that the top hat is clothing. But it will not automatically know that Darcy is a man rather than a woman because it does not know the social convention implied by “Mr”.

So here’s this project that you can remix if you want to play around with it too. It’s set up as a static site, so you’ll have to run ./auto.sh manually when you make a change.