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From: who.am.i@io.org (Alessandro Bonk Boink Bonk Brovont Blink Bonk)
Subject: Re: Inform 5.5 or 6.0? Worth the switch for a game in midst of coding?
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Date: Sat, 22 Jun 1996 01:00:01 GMT

Fri, 21 Jun 1996 13:59:09 GMT, jeffmill@ix.netcom.com (Jeffrey F. Miller) wrote:
>the _Designer's Manual_, I'm afraid I might be very lost.  I would appriciate
>some insight from those of you with experience with Inform 6.0.

I found inform6 compiler quite a bit stricter on syntax. But I like this!
It forces me to write more coherant code -- for a change.

I found updating my code really wasn't very hard (and i'm no inform
technical wizard!). There wasn't *that* much to change. It looked extremely
intimidating at first due to the reams of extremely cryptic error
messages--

I find the error messages pretty incomprehensible in general. (-: But they
tell me the line number so i'm usually able to figure out what the problem
is (by trial and error somtimes) in spite of the incomprehension.

In most cases fixing one line would remove a LOT of the long list of
errors, i guess when the syntax screws up in one place it can make the
compiler think it sees errors in many places immediately following.

Main things for me were keeping keywords lower case (i used to habitiually
type "Print" but now it must be "print"). Also you can't seem to use { }
braces as generally as used to be allowed. Basically you can only use
braces with if/else and other branching structures. Before you could use
them to group code just about anywhere. And lastly (as far as i can recal)
had to remove my "print_paddr" statements and replace with "print
(string)".

These are not very technical descriptions but these are my experiences. It
wasn't too bad. Just put inform 6 into a new directory and copy over your
code... that way you can go back to your inform5 if you can't figure it
out. If you have problems you can't figure out post here, surely lots of
help here. (-:

In my opinion it's worth upgrading even if the ONLY reason is that inform6
doesn't require the painful \ on the end of each quoted line to join them!

-- 
 _____________________________________________________________________
  Tim Muddleton =-=-=- with love and squalor -=-=-= as544@torfree.net
  -=- don't miss The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. or else -=-
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