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rupertl / inform-mode

An Emacs major mode for editing Inform 6 source code.
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Rename to ‘inform6-mode’ #3

Open bignose-debian opened 8 years ago

bignose-debian commented 8 years ago

The Inform project has, for better or worse, made an entirely different language, fundamentally incompatible with Inform 6, and named it Inform 7.

Meanwhile, they continue to maintain Inform 6 as a distinct language, and part of the Inform 7 tool chain.

They really should IMO be given different names to make clear that they are not compatible languages, and that there is no “upgrade” from Inform 6 to Inform 7.

But it seems we'll need to deal with the names as chosen by the Inform project.

I propose that “Inform 6” and “Inform 7” should always be used to refer to each language respectively, and avoid naming either of the languages “Inform” without a number.

This implies, then, that the Emacs mode in this code base should now be named ‘inform6-mode’, to be clear that it has nothing to do with editing Inform 7 code, and deals only with Inform 6 and earlier.

bignose-debian commented 8 years ago

Rupert Lane has already corresponded with me about this, and I wanted to have it recorded as an issue on this code base so the community interested in this Emacs mode can discuss it also.

rupertl commented 8 years ago

Ben,

Thanks for raising this issue. I'm still on the fence for this one.

From my point of view, the advantages of renaming the mode are making it clear what flavour of Inform it supports, which would help new users getting started with Inform 6 or 7 have an easier time.

Disadvantages are mainly technical: if the mode's customisable variables were to change, eg from inform-auto-newline to inform6-auto-newline, this would break existing users' setups - it's possible to work around this with defvaralias/make-obsolete-variable but it would be a mess as nearly every variable would need to be changed. Also inform-mode is published on Marmalade and there seems no easy way to rename or delete a package, so the old version would live on if a new version was published there or on ELPA/MELPA under a new name. Users who upgrade their packages on Emacs would not get the renamed version unless they manually changed it.

I would also like to hear from existing inform-mode users and other members of the Inform community on whether to make this change or not.

emacsomancer commented 7 years ago

Is there any plan to upgrade this emacsmode to work with inform7?

bignose-debian commented 7 years ago

@emacsomancer, the Inform 7 language, despite the name, is a thoroughly different language:

Although it is (in name) the successor to Inform 6, the syntax of the language is entirely different to its predecessor.

This Emacs mode supports the Inform 6 language.

An Emacs mode to support Inform 7 should really be an entirely different mode from this one; best to ask for (or start!) a new project for that.

emacsomancer commented 7 years ago

@bignose-debian Looking into this, it's somewhat complicated, isn't it, since Inform7 still (after a decade) hasn't been open-sourced. (Though perhaps it wouldn't be impossible to reverse engineer given that it appears to output to Inform 6 as an intermediate step.) But all of this is after all rather beside the point here.

rupertl commented 7 years ago

@emacsomancer , there are no plans to support Inform 7 in this mode as the syntax is quite different.

emacsomancer commented 3 years ago

The Inform 7 issue would seem to be addressed by https://github.com/GuiltyDolphin/inform7-mode