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From: buzzard@world.std.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: Why Inform?
Message-ID: <G7s9tE.BLI@world.std.com>
Date: Fri, 26 Jan 2001 18:53:37 GMT
References: <3a6fdf2c.15625292@News.CIS.DFN.DE> <94q952$mu$2@news.lth.se> <3a70017a.24408341@News.CIS.DFN.DE> <94rp1q$bpu$1@news.lth.se>
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
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Xref: news.duke.edu rec.arts.int-fiction:82679

In article <94rp1q$bpu$1@news.lth.se>, Magnus Olsson <mol@pobox.com> wrote:
>Good heavens, I didn't mean to discourage anyone from choosing Inform
>- I was just responding to Adam Cadre's remark that he didn't know
>(and didn't care) why TADS' syntax was considered better (from a
>theoretical point of view), despite being worse (from his point of
>view).

As someone who's been programming for twenty years and writing
compilers and interpreters for ten, I find that the "theoretical"
flaws in Inform mentioned above are not what bother me about
Inform (although I do perceive them as flaws), nor is it the
seemingly arbitrary use of even more bizarre symbols than C for
some operations (if you read enough C code, you'll find the
idiom "!!x" used; consider the equivalent in Inform, which
uses "~~" instead of "!").

Rather, the things that bother me about Inform are the library
(far too many hacks, arbitrary things seemingly done for the
sake of Curses, insufficient modularity to allow you to modify
the libraries effectively, the list goes on and on) and the
DM (it may be well written from an English major's standpoint,
but it's not a great piece of technical writing in its function
as a reference manual--important information hidden in exercises,
poorly organized and difficult to find what you're looking for,
many things left entirely undocumented or unexplained [e.g.
the implicit switch on action]; it's not the lousiest reference
manual I've seen, but it's certainly the lousiest well-written
reference manual I've seen, and I'm constantly boggled by the
praise the community bestows upon it; I suppose it must be a
good tutorial at least).

Of course I have 3 WIPs in Inform and none in TADS, because
(a) I learned Inform before I realized how significant those
flaws were, and (b) I don't know if TADS is any better and
have learned to live with the Inform flaws for now.

SeanB
