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From: z_bowlinjb@titan.sfasu.edu (Berek Halfhand aka John Bowlin)
Subject: Re: I-F Language questions. (MOO)
Message-ID: <1996Apr22.131050@titan.sfasu.edu>
Date: 22 Apr 96 13:10:50 CST
References: <4le3rm$t7f@pipe12.nyc.pipeline.com>
Organization: Stephen F. Austin State University
Lines: 28

In article <4le3rm$t7f@pipe12.nyc.pipeline.com>, paradox@nyc.pipeline.com (Matthew Branton) writes:
> Recently I read a thread about this, but never have seen any concrete
> opinions of MOO as an I-F programming language,  In my opinion extremely
> rich interactive fiction could be created with MOO's incredible programming
> language, not to mention the fact almost anyone with Telnet could access
> it. Well let me know what you think, and maybe i will expand upon my idea,
> if not i guess i better start working harder in Hugo :) -- Matt

If you choose to write a MOO adventure, that would be one thing and I'm
sure there would be people who would play it, etc. But I don't think
you'd get as many votes in the IF contest than you would if you used
Hugo. And, you're not likely to get many votes with Hugo either based
on what I've been reading in this newsgroup. For all practical purposes,
it looks like the two main languages to choose from will be Inform and
TADS, because most of the people doing the voting will have interpreters
for those. Of course, if we got some generous people to get the Hugo 2.1
source and compile it for some more systems, that would be a good way
to get more votes for a Hugo entry. I've looked at Hugo and I like its
syntax better than TADS or Inform, but I can't tell about anything else.
Is there a library for Hugo, like TADS' Worldclass and the Inform 5/12
library? Is there a lot of sample code out there? So far, I haven't
found much. I also really like the ALAN language, but I find that not
having the widespread use and support is a major downside to choosing
that language. If the authors and users of those systems would post more
code and/or libraries to the i-f archive, I would be much more likely
to use those languages. As it is now, I'm still torn between writing
in inform or examining TADS closer.


