intfiction.org

This may belong to another section, or maybe off the planet completely, but im ultimately and presently looking for collaborators after all.

Why is there no interest in using i7 for real programming? I showed that with a little help from the outside, its possible to use it to do real work, and man is it cool.

So...uh...am i looking in the wrong circles or something?
any ideas?

What exactly do you mean by "real programming"? At its most basic, using Inform 7 is as much a programming language as Tads 3, just with a different vest, and making - programming - a Cloak of Darkness is elementary.

If you want to do fancier stuff with I7, you can.

Maybe you mean an "abuse" (like a Sokoban or Tetris port - things the language was never meant to handle, but does). I'm pretty sure abuses are just as possible as they were in I6, though maybe harder and less intuitive. Nevertheless, an abuse does not constitute "real" programming, not necessarily.

If you simply mean that I7 is not just a toy and is a powerful programming language that's been underused... I wouldn't agree at all, thinking - mostly - of Blue Lacuna.

This question is either incomplete, or not in English.

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Judging by koo5's other posts, I think that by "real," they mean non-IF. For example, this: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2953&p=20571

Inform only compiles to virtual machines not used outside of the I-F community. How would you get it to talk to anything else? It's kinda sandboxed by default.

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Blog at Gamasutra :: Programmer's Guide to Inform 7 :: Seattle I-F

I suspect you can get away with lots of things using Inform's ability to read/write to a file, but that would be so inneficcient when compared to using a programming language that's actually designed to do those things anyway...

to kinda answer: my frustration comes from my goal to make i6 compile to another, ordinary, language. The task is clearly on the limits of my abilities, im slacking off, and have barely finished reading the i6 language manual.

What do you mean by "compile to"? Do you want to translate I6 source code into, say, C source code? Do you want to compile I6 source code into a machine-code executable? I'm not sure what the purpose of either of these would be, other than as a (admittedly pretty interesting but ultimately useless) programming exercise.

I think what's being asked is, "why no interest in using inform (or a language like it) to make a wide variety of programs?"

It is an interesting idea to use a language that looks more like spoken sentences to try and make computer programs, but for things more complicated than IF games, that gets tricky, and for more detailed programs, the advantages that come from an easy to learn syntax like Inform's are no longer important.

It's easier to learn to make an IF game in Inform, but even if a language with a more linguistic syntax existed to make "real" programs as you put it, I would probably still rather use Python.

At the risk of descending into pedantry, I'm not so sure Inform's syntax is 'easy to learn' at all. Yes, it does look easy, but that's illusory; I'm well past the point when I thought I could rely on raw I7 code without testing it thoroughly.

(So why use it? Well, because it confers other benefits, such as being easy to read and conceptualize in, or being damn fun. A language being enjoyable is nothing to sneeze at.)

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~Björn Paulsen