Curious about I6

I have a background in Atari Basic and did a little FORTRAN years ago (1980s and 90s…ancient history, I know…). I’ve been using I7 for almost 2 years, now, naturally I wonder about the basic ‘nuts and bolts’ of programming. Is there much that can be done with I6 that cannot be done with I7? And is it worth going into?

Thanks

You can make tighter games that fit into smaller architectures, but everything that i7 does is in i6 (as i6 is a step in compiling i7 code).

Thanks HTP. Just wondering if you can do more detailed stuff with I6, if it can be more ‘nuanced’.

There are a few I6 tricks which take more effort to build with I7, or run more slowly. (But speed is generally only an issue for large games.)

However, it sounds like you’re talking about game design techniques rather than specific implementation details. There’s no real difference there. In fact, I7 makes it easier to write more nuanced game elements, because it has a higher-level model and lets you do more with less code.

Thanks, Zarf, I guess I’ll stick with I7.

Since the question of blank lines has come up in another thread, I’ll add one counterexample: I7 has a strong and fairly inflexible notion of when it should print blank lines (or paragraph breaks). It can take extra work to customize this. Sometimes it’s impossible to stop I7 from throwing in a blank line, and you have to rearrange your code to avoid it. Everyone who’s worked with I7 has run into this frustration.

Hmmm… I’d agree with Zarf on this. It’s probably easier to write nuanced stories in i7, simply because i7 is a higher level programming language and therefore easier to get your head around and get done what you generally want done.

In i6, you’d probably have an easier time writing something like the zedit editor, which I’m not completely sure you could do well or at all in i7.

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ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiv … zcode.html

The printing model in I7 irritates me to no end. If there’s one thing that should have been loosely-coupled, it’s that.