- "First off, it is really low level. From what I understand, not even the people at Infocom wrote raw zil. Instead, they used Lisp macros that generated zil."
Is there any evidence of this? The standard guide to ZIL (written as an in-house document at Infocom for new programmers [1]) presents it very much as if people would be writing it directly. It's also not that low level, only slightly more low level than Inform 6.
[1] https://archive.org/details/Learning_ZIL_Steven_Eric_Meretzk...
by busfahrer
1 subcomments
- The article mentions the Z-Machine as the earliest fantasy console. I'm wondering whether CHIP-8 would qualify?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIP-8
- Interesting read! A lot of AoC challenges involve navigating 2D grids, which can map quite nicely onto the text adventure model of connected rooms with compass direction exits (a grid of straightforward little passages, all alike). This insight led me to attempt Day 6 from last year's Advent of Code in Inform 7[1], though I ultimately admitted defeat on the second half. I've always found Inform 7's Mathematics Textbook English syntax quite charming, though perhaps I would have a different perspective if I'd ever attempted to build anything substantial with it.
[1]: https://davidyat.es/2024/12/23/aoc-2024-part2/#day-6-python-...
by verytrivial
2 subcomments
- Another worthy mention in this space is Linus Åkesson's dialog language[1]. From its description:
Dialog is a domain-specific language for creating works of interactive fiction. It is heavily inspired by Inform 7 (Graham Nelson et al. 2006) and Prolog (Alain Colmerauer et al. 1972).
An optimizing compiler, dialogc, translates high-level Dialog code into Z-code, a platform-independent runtime format originally created by Infocom in 1979.
Development seems dormant at the moment, but it feels more like Inform 7 'done right' to me. If my brain was a little bigger and calmer I'd be all over it. It has excellent documentation too. Very portable -- I compiled it locally under Termux on my phone with nothing but Clang.[1] https://www.linusakesson.net/dialog/index.php
- I thought this was about the other Z-Machine at first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_Pulsed_Power_Facility
(used at Sandia for inertial confinement fusion)
- I think I gotta try it with AVR-8 assembly or something like that this year.
- I was secretly hoping they would write solutions in Inform 7.
by meindnoch
1 subcomments
- Oh. From the title I thought it would be the Z machine at Sandia labs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_Pulsed_Power_Facility
Hacker News