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Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2001 09:09:54 -0400
From: John Colagioia <JColagioia@csi.com>
Organization: No Conspiracy Here...
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Subject: Re: Why Inform?
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I tried mailing directly, but my server doesn't seem to want to speak to yours at the
moment.  At your leisure, could you pass on a copy?  I may not use any particular piece,
but as a prototype/alternate view and functional system, I can hardly pass it up as a
point of comparison and source of ideas.

David Given wrote:

> I already have most of one, based on lcc. It'll run simple programs.
> The problems I ran into are:
> * The Z-machine is based on unsigned arithmetic, C on signed. This makes a
> lot of simple arithmetic and comparisons annoyingly complicated.
> * You need a suitable small libc. I was using the one from ELKS
> (Linux-16).
> * The assembler sucks.
> The last is the killer. I was using inform itself to assemble my files;
> unfortunately, inform's assembler mode is bug-ridde. There is also an
> annoying lack of things like bss, which means that I have to define a
> stack as a big array of bytes.
> I eventually gave up at the proof-of-concept stage. But, it did work. You
> could compile stuff, assemble it, download the gamefile into a Z-machine
> terp and *it would work*. It was rather worrying.
> Mail me if you want a copy of what I have.

