• Overview

§1. This website holds human-readable, or "woven", forms of the source code for the Inform programming language and its associated tools. To download and build Inform, go to the repository's front page and follow the instructions there. These pages are purely to help maintainers of Inform, or anyone interested in looking under the hood, to see how it works.

This source code is platform-independent, and provides Inform as a set of command-line utilities following Unix conventions. Most writers using Inform do so through a user interface provided by an app, and those apps have their own repositories holding source code which is very much not platform-independent. But the tools here form the engine inside each of them.

§2. The Inform software uses literate programming, a doctrine invented by Donald Knuth. Under LP, a single program is called a "web", and can either be "woven" for humans to read or "tangled" for computers to compile. You are reading the woven form. There are around 30 webs in this repository, though half of those make modules rather than stand-alone programs, so the actual number of programs is smaller.

The inweb and intest repositories also contain webs, and have pages similar to this one where they can be seen. In particular, inweb contains a web of a module called foundation which is used by all of the command-line tools associated with Inform, and which provides utility functions for memory-management and the like, but contains none of the logic guiding how a program should run or what it should do. For convenience, some of these pages provide links to foundation.

§3. The webs here are divided up as follows:

• (a) The Inform 7 compiler reads in natural-language source text and writes out a program for a conventional programming language, normally the C-like Inform 6. Its three phases are each provided as stand-alone tools: inbuild, the front end; inform7, the core; and inter, the back end.
• (b) Other command-line tools are useful for building or working with Inform, but do not involve compilation: inblorb, a packaging manager; indoc, to format documentation; inpolicy, a lint-like tool for checking Inform's source code; and inrtps, to format run-time problem messages.
• (c) Wnenever Inform 7 runs, it also reads in an "extension" piece of source text called Basic Inform, defining the language, and it often then also reads another called Standard Rules, enabling it to be used for interactive fiction. It also uses precompiled libraries of code called "kits".