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From: buzzard@TheWorld.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: which IF system has best world model & parser?
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Date: Thu, 11 Jul 2002 08:43:06 GMT
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Tzvetan Mikov <ceco@jupiter.com> wrote:
>"Ed" <ed@mewsic.SPAMGUARD.com> wrote in message
>> "Tzvetan Mikov" <ceco@jupiter.com> wrote:
>> >[attribution lost]
>> >> You would think that by now a C-library or C++-library would have
>> >> materialized that allowed you to write IF, but I honestly can't
>> >> think of one.
>> > I asked a question along these lines some time ago (the thread was
>> > called "[Dis]Advantages of IF languages")  and eventually became
>> > convinced that a C/C++/C#/Java IF library would be very inconvenient
>> > to use, if not outright impossible.
>>
>> Could you go into more detail, please?
>
>for example how Tads evolved from a C library, through a C library with
>scripting capabilities, finally to a full-blown language (IIRC).

There's

   http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=GsB7wq.7E%40world.std.com

which both the authors of Tads and Hugo followed up saying
it roughly described the evolution of their systems.

The two issues of dealing with polymorphism and initializaing lots
of exceptional objects seem to me to be crucial. As I like to
put it: traditional languages are designed around manipulation
of entities that are all "the same" in some sense. Authorship of
IF is apparently essentially unique in the demands it puts for
creating and manipulating lots of entities that are entirely
different, which thus leads to what I said in the first sentence
of this paragraph. This uniqueness sees to be a consequence of
the nature of the real world and the level at which we are
"simulating" it; see also Andrew Plotkin's IF definition for
some hints that this is part of what makes IF interesting.

SeanB
