[z-machine] The Z-machine and Informs 6 and 7

[Timothy Partridge]

Graham Nelson recently said:


> a little. Inform 6.31 is undergoing maintenance, and we're
> looking around to see what it needs before it can be released:
> testing, seems to be the answer. Inform 7 is about to have its
> third semi-public beta (anyone receiving this is welcome to
> take part), and is now I think powerful enough to make quite
> releasable games.

I would be interested in seeing it. (I still have a RISC OS machine and C
compiler. Are you on the Mac these days?)

> (a) I would like better and more transparent Unicode support.
> Ideally, I6 should read a UTF-8 input file and write a story file
> which an interpreter with one of the "big" fonts would simply get
> right. I've largely forgotten the issues involved, but I have a feeling
> that it isn't completely trivial, and there are awkward dictionary
> issues involved. I just feel that any 21st-century Z-machine ought
> to understand Unicode. This might need careful thought.

I looked into this a while back. It isn't trivial. Significant parts of the
lexer assume that characters are only one byte long. It might be possible to
cheat by converting Unicode characters into @{...} sequences. The snag is
that any error messages from the compiler would show these expanded
sequences rather than the original text, so strings might end up as very
hard to read. 

The alternative is to rewrite bits to make them more Unicode friendly. How
do you feel about having identifier names that have letters outside a-z and
A-Z, so non English speakers can name their variables in their own language?

I may be willing to take up the gauntlet, but don't have massive amounts of
spare time at the moment.

Regards,

   Tim

-- 
Tim Partridge. Any opinions expressed are mine only and not those of my employer