Background
I’ve been learning more about parser IF lately, and what I think I like most about it (and what I liked most about lurking around LambdaMOO back in the day) is exploring space that is at the same time imaginative and rule-bound.
Learning to write parser IF in Inform is especially interesting and exciting to me (someone whose background is in poetry) because it is based on natural language input. Here’s an example of Inform source text from the Inform Manual:
“Disenchantment Bay”
The Cabin is a room. “The front of the small cabin is entirely occupied with navigational instruments, a radar display, and radios for calling back to shore. Along each side runs a bench with faded blue vinyl cushions, which can be lifted to reveal the storage space underneath. A glass case against the wall contains several fishing rods.
Scratched windows offer a view of the surrounding bay, and there is a door south to the deck. A sign taped to one wall announces the menu of tours offered by the Yakutat Charter Boat Company.”
The Cabin contains a glass case. In the glass case is a collection of fishing rods.
The case is closed, transparent, and openable.
The bench is in the cabin. On the bench are some blue vinyl cushions.
Here, objects and spaces are described principally in terms of their appearance, their properties, and their relationship to one another.
In the essay “A Future for the Novel” (1956), Alain Robbe-Grillet writes, “Thus it is the entire literary language that must change, that is changing already. From day to day, we witness the growing repugnance felt by people of greater awareness for words of a visceral, analogical, or incantatory character. On the other hand, the visual or descriptive adjective, the word that contents itself with measuring, locating, limiting, defining, indicates a difficult but most likely direction for a new art of the novel.” Continue reading “Where one endless corridor follows another: thoughts on translating Robbe-Grillet into Inform 7”
