Manuals ======= For the first time in two years, an attempt has been made to rewrite the documentation altogether (and "properly this time"), though some passages from the old manual do remain. There are now two Inform manuals: The Inform Designer's Manual (106 pages of A4) The Inform Technical Manual (22 pages of A4) and only the former will be of interest to most users. The manuals are given in TeX, a text-markup-language used by mathematicians and scientists which is just about readable as ASCII (after a fashion); there will shortly be plain text and postscript editions too. The Designer's Manual has some 31 exercises with full answers (mainly for extended examples: how to implement difficult puzzles), proper documentation of exactly what attributes do, advice on error messages, a long index (about 800 entries), a specification of the language, a lengthy tutorial (the first half is mainly tutorial in style) and details of all the new features. In my view it's hugely better than its predecessor. The Technical Manual is, as it claims, technical. The author's paper, The Specification of the Z-Machine (44 pages of A4) (which also documents the assembler at the bottom of Inform) has also been re-posted in TeX form, in an updated edition. It has been tidied up somewhat and a few mistakes in the previous edition (none of much consequence) have been corrected; the very last opcode in Version 6, recently discovered by Mark Howell, has been added. Inform 5.3 changed the opcode names slightly to bring them in line with a standard set of names agreed between Mark and myself, and this paper uses them. (Thus Mark's disassembler "txd" now uses exactly the same names as the Inform assembler.) Balances ======== The source code to Release 2 of this slight but hopefully amusing game is now available (it needs I5.4 to compile). The game itself has been re-posted also, and has many small bugs (none serious) fixed. The author is grateful to the many who have written to make complaints and suggestions. The "spell-casting" code is, incidentally, easily transplantable. Toyshop ======= A number of new toys have arrived on the shop floor: a matchbook of five matches and a box of eight candles (to demonstrate imitation and real plural objects, respectively), a blackboard you can write any sentence on and a pair of gloves which can separate into a left and right glove on request. Advent ====== Is hardly changed at all, except in being flagged as Release 2 to distinguish it from the incorrectly-compiled version posted earlier. Files on Inform =============== The Inform home directory is if-archive/infocom/compilers/inform at the anonymous FTP archive ftp.gmd.de. The directory "source" contains ANSI C source for the compiler, divided into a number of files. Note that the header file no longer contains the ever-growing modification history, which has been moved to the Technical Manual, which porters may find useful. There is also a single tar file containing all the source files. The directory "examples" contains Inform source code for Shell, Hello Cruel World, Toyshop, Advent and Balances. Each is a single file named as whatever.inf. The directory "library" contains the three files which make up the Library, i.e., parser.h verblib.h grammar.h The directory "executables" is provided for executable copies. The Acorn Archimedes version is called archimedes_5.4 and I would ask porters to use a similar notation - i.e., to use a file name to indicate the machine, include the number 5.4 and indicate the compression format if there is one. (This one is a single executable file.) The directory "manuals" contains TeX source of the documents available: designers_manual.tex technical_manual.tex specification.tex and will hopefully soon contain .ps (PostScript) and .plain_text files. In addition there are a number of actual games, which have file-names ending in ",z3" or ".z5". These must be downloaded in binary mode, and can only be run with the aid of an interpreter for your machine: see the directory if-archive/infocom/interpreters to find one. Graham Nelson Oxford University October 2nd, 1994