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Inform 7

Version: 10.2.0-beta+6X82 'Krypton' (17 November 2024)

About Inform

Inform is a programming language for creating interactive fiction, using natural language syntax. Using natural language and drawing on ideas from linguistics and from literate programming, Inform is widely used as a medium for literary writing, as a prototyping tool in the games industry, and in education, both at school and university level (where Inform is often assigned material for courses on digital narrative). It has several times ranked in the top 100 most influential programming languages according to the TIOBE index. Created in April 2006, it was open-sourced in April 2022.

Inform is itself a literate program (written with inweb), one of the largest in the world. This means that a human-readable form of the code is continuously maintained alongside it: see ★ Inform: The Program

Software in this repository is copyright Graham Nelson 2006-2022 except where otherwise stated, and available under the Artistic License 2.0.

To consult...Turn to...
Brief news about ongoing worknotes/working_notes.md
Licencing and copyright policynotes/copyright.md
Branching and versioning policynotes/versioning.md
Language evolution policyhttps://github.com/ganelson/inform-evolution
Version history and release notesnotes/version_history.md
Pending changes not yet releasednotes/release/pending.md

Repositories

This is the "core Inform" repository, holding source code for the compiler, and for everything needed to run it on the command line. However:

Build Instructions

Caution: The main branch of this repository generally holds "unstable", that is, unreleased work-in-progress versions of Inform. See notes/versioning.md.

Make a directory in which to work: let's call this work. Then:

Caution again: inform7 is written in standard C99, but is a challengingly large task for a C compiler. In the past we have had difficulties using gcc to compile it, and although we believe these may now be resolved, we recommend compiling the core Inform tools with clang rather than gcc where possible.

Issues and Contributions

The 2006-2021 Inform bug tracker, powered by Mantis, has now closed, and its issues and comments have been migrated to a a Jira tracker. The curator of the bug tracker is Brian Rushton, and the administrator is Hugo Labrande.

Note that Inweb and Intest have their own bug trackers (here and here). Please do not report bugs on those to the Inform tracker, or vice versa.

Members of the Inform community are welcome to open pull requests on this repository to address minor issues - for example, to fix bugs at the tracker, or to correct clear-cut typos or other errors. Contributions of this sort do not need an Inform Evolution proposal, but anything on a larger scale is likely to.

Inventory of this Repository

"I can't help feeling that if someone had asked me before the universe began how it would turn out, I should have guessed something a bit less like an old curiosity shop and a bit more like a formal French garden - an orderly arrangement of straight avenues, circular walks, and geometrically shaped trees and hedges." (Michael Frayn)

Inform is not a single program, but an assemblage of programs and resources. Some, including the inform7 compiler itself, are "literate programs", also called "webs". The notation ★ marks these, and links are provided to their human-readable forms.

Source for command-line tools

This most important contents of this repository are the source webs for the following command-line tools:

Extensions shipped with Inform

The following webs are the source for the two most important extensions shipped with Inform:

Kits shipped with Inform

The following webs are the source for kits of Inter code shipped with Inform (inside the Basic Inform and Standard Rules extensions). Kits are libraries of code needed at run-time, and whose source is written in Inform 6 notation:

Website templates and interpreters shipped with Inform

These are templates used by Inform to release story files within a website:

These are Javascript interpreters used to release such websites in a form which can play the story files interactively online:

Documentation shipped with Inform

Two books come with the Inform apps. The source code for these books is in indoc format: the indoc tool makes those into ePubs, mini-websites, or the pseudo-websites inside the apps.

In addition, there are:

Retrospective builds of Inform

New in 2022 is the ability for apps to use past instead of present versions of the core Inform software when compiling a project. This means the core software distribution needs to contain some form of those past versions - at minimum, the extensions and compiler tools for (say) versions 9.1, 9.2 and 9.3.

That material is held in the "retrospective" directory. Note that documentation from past versions (e.g., past versions of "Writing with Inform") is not included.

Resources copied here from elsewhere

Stable versions of the following are periodically copied into this repository, but this is not where development on them is done, and no pull requests will be accepted. (Note that these are not git submodules.)

Binary resources (such as image files)

Other files and folders in this repository

Colophon

This README.md file was generated automatically by Inweb, and should not be edited. To make changes, edit inform.rmscript and re-generate.