2lbProgramming / FictionCompiler

A foolish attempt to create a new declarative language for the creation of Interactive Fiction and Visual Novels.
MIT License
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The Nature of the Language #5

Open Textmode opened 8 years ago

Textmode commented 8 years ago

Obviously, before we can design the language, we need to decide what we want it to be.

So far the only firm opinion I have is that an IF language needs to be declarative, that is based around asserting facts and relationships. with actual operation constructs (such as functions, or imperative code) as a secondary ­– though necessary – feature. I base this opinion on two things;

  1. The practical observation that most of the average Fiction is stating that things exist, where they exist, and how they are described.
  2. The popularist observation that it is one of the distinguishing features of the most popular IF language Inform7.

I open this as a thread of discussion for the broad structure of the language (finer points should be discussed separately, to avoid excessive tangents)