inform7/notes/release/1-7.md

Release notes for Inform v1.7 (build 3T38)

This release was made on 10 July 2006, before Inform was open-sourced. At that time versions of Inform were identified by build codes in the form NLNN.

This is part of the historical archive of release notes.

Language

• The "means" and "means that" syntaxes are being withdrawn. These were always rather crude word-substitution devices: to quote the documentation, "now deprecated... may be withdrawn". In this release, the Standard Rules no longer use the syntaxes even internally, and this prevents a number of slightly odd side-effects related to the words "above" and "below". In the next release, the ability to use the "means" and "means that" syntaxes will be removed altogether.
• Two new relations are built in to Inform to handle doors and locks; the verbal forms "to be through D" and "to unlock D" express these. This mimics syntax previously achieved using "means that", but works in a much tidier way, and is more flexible: for instance, "things which unlock the Great Gate" is now a legal description.
• Type-checking extended further into the descriptions D used in constructions such as "total P of D" or "a random D", and into complicated descriptions given as part of the conditions for rules to apply. (For instance, "Instead of taking a container in 100" - clearly absurd, as how can a container be inside a number? - now produces a problem message.)
• Unnecessary Inform 6 general parsing routines are no longer compiled for kinds of value which are not ever parsed: under some circumstances this can save a significant amount of space at run-time.
• Extended the range of what can be negated using "now", so that, e.g., "now Elizabeth does not love anyone" is now allowed. (An obvious feature whose absence was reported as a bug, but technically it's new.)

Documentation, examples and extensions

Examples

• "Uptempo" given a better "fast time rule".
• In some 21 of the examples, the syntax "-- has a property called --" has been rewritten to be more specific about what kind of value is involved. (For instance, to say "-- has some text called --" if the property will hold text.) This is better style, and allows Inform to check usage more carefully.

Problem messages

• Problem message added for grammar token trying to understand a kind of value which cannot be parsed, such as 'rule' or 'scene'.
• Improved problem messages for property declarations, and allowed property declarations to create properties whose values have to objects of a given kind.
• Improved problem message for when "Understand the command..." goes bad.
• Improved problem message for incorrect usage of "... condition" names.
• Added problem message if a verb is defined with two present plurals (as this can't be right, and usually means that someone has tried to define the past tense using "they" rather than "he", "she" or "it").
• Added problem message for an attempt to "change O to A", where O is an object and A is an adjective the truth of which can be tested, but not changed (e.g. "change O to visible").
• Added problem message for creating a kind of value containing "of". (This never worked, due to all kinds of grammatical ambiguities, but used to fail with an inexplicable problem message: now it fails with an apology.)

Bug fixes

• Removed spurious problem message claiming that certain "after" rules would have no effect.
• Fixed bug whereby arbitrary text could, under some circumstances, match the "[number]" token of grammar.
• Fixed bug under which rules applying to actions done for the Nth time might fail to apply if these actions had been interrupted by other actions earlier in the same turn (e.g., to implicitly take something before moving on to do something with it).
• Fixed bug whereby specifying that one of the named built-in rules belongs to another rulebook (i.e., as well as its usual one) would result in one of the two rulebooks being a partial duplicate of the other.
• Fixed bug causing "item described" (and the thing implicitly meant by a bare property name) in a text with substitutions to refer to the wrong thing, when this text is being printed from within another text with substitutions.
• Fixed bug in which tests such as "if not visited" sometimes lost the sense of the "not" and instead tested "if visited".
• Fixed bug whereby route-finding and counting steps through reciprocal various-to-various relations would sometimes give incorrect results if the relation had been changed from its initial state at run-time.
• Fixed bug by which "everything" was not always equivalent to "every thing", and similarly for "everyone", "everybody" and "everywhere".
• Fixed bug to do with parsing times of day around midnight and midday.
• Fixed obscure bug to do with editing the player's command. (Well, in fact Jesse McGrew fixed it.)
• Fixed bug in which a property is being declared as possible but whose name coincides with a participle of one of the containment verbs. (E.g., "A weapon can be worn.")
• Fixed bug whereby a rule about "doing something" (unspecified) to some specific kind of noun would result in run-time errors if the current action did not take a noun, e.g., when looking.
• Fixed bug whereby setting the printed plural name of a kind might lead to a failure to compile through Inform 6 (due to a duplicated "plural" property).
• Fixed two unrelated bugs to do with apostrophes inside commands leading to grammar declarations which failed to compile through Inform 6.
• Fixed bug causing spurious problem messages with garbled text: this affected the examples "Table Foosball" and "Air Conditioning is Standard". (We believe the bug only manifested itself under Mac OS X running on an Intel processor.)
• Fixed bug causing scene begin/end conditions to go wrong if they tried to use the "location of X" phrase.
• Fixed bug causing problems with scene begin/end conditions to be reported at the wrong sentence of the source text.
• Spurious newline after "That noun did not make sense in this context." removed.

Windows app

• (Windows only) Boxed quotations are now correctly displayed in the game tab.
• (Windows only) Extensions can be created, opened and edited within the application.
• (Windows only) If an error occurs in an extension, clicking on the link in the problem report opens that extension.
• (Windows only) The file dialog for installing extensions now allows multiple files to be selected at once.
• (Windows only) Undo and redo in the source tab now works correctly with Unicode characters.
• (Windows only) Added a "Trim skein" button to the skein tab, which removes all unlocked skein knots.