inform7/notes/release/9-2.md

Release notes for Inform v9.2 (build 6L38)

This release was made on 30 August 2014, before Inform was open-sourced. At that time bugs were tracked by a Mantis server, with seven-digit issue numbers, and versions of Inform were identified by build codes in the form NLNN.

This is part of the historical archive of release notes.

Introduction

Unlike its predecessor, build 6L02, this release of Inform is aimed almost entirely at maintenance: it fixes around 150 bugs, most of them minor and related to recent changes. Users of 6L02 should be able to upgrade with no preparation needed; users of earlier builds, though, would be well advised to read the notes on the big changes in 6L02 before proceeding.

But there is one major development, all the same: for the first time Inform is released for a mass-market mobile operating system - Android.

Minor new features in the language

It was realised soon after the release of 6L02 that the text substitutions "[those]" and "[Those]" were ambiguous, since if they're applied to an object which is a man or woman then they would have to be different in the accusative and nominative cases. Consider the two texts:

	"But [we] [aren't] holding [regarding the noun][those]."
	"But [regarding the noun][those] [aren't] available."

and suppose the noun is Andrew. Then "[those]" needs to expand as "him" in the first case but as "he" in the second. To distinguish these,

	"[those in the nominative]"
	"[those in the accusative]"

and similarly for Those. But what should plain "[those]" and "[Those]" do? We note that the Standard Rules used "[those]" in 7 responses, all accusative, and "[Those]" in a further 12, all nominative. Accordingly, Inform now defines "[those]" as equivalent to "[those in the accusative]" and "[Those]" as "[Those in the nominative]". This fixes bug 0001232, and though it's not a perfect solution, it's intended to be something we might revisit when Inform has a better idea of noun cases (as it will need for, say, adaptive German). Note that "nominative" and "accusative" are the two values of the kind "grammatical case"; "nominative" existed in 6L02, but "accusative" is new in this build.

The real square root function can now be applied to any numerical quantity for which the dimensions (in physics terms) are a perfect square. Thus, if we're using the Metric Units extension,

	the real square root of 4 sq m

produces the length "2.0m". This also means that equations such as:

	Equation - Pythagoras's Theorem
	a = root (b^2+c^2)
	where a is a length, b is a length, c is a length.

can be solved for "a"; this previously failed because "root" could be applied only to dimensionless numbers. (See also bug report 0001264.)

The following are now equivalent:

	[1] A food is a kind of thing which is edible. [2] A food is a kind of edible thing.

(Previously [1] was allowed, but [2] was disallowed.)

Action descriptions like the following are now rejected:

	Instead of taking seven things: ...
	Instead of taking the teddy bear on the dresser: ...

The first case is rejected because a single noun can't be "seven things", and the second because "the teddy bear", a proper noun, is being used as if it were a common noun. ("a thing on the dresser" would be fine.) Previous builds of Inform allowed these, but compiled misleading tests: e.g. the latter would simply test whether the teddy bear was on the dresser, regardless of whether or not it was the thing taken.

It is now officially illegal to create something new with one of the following reserved names:

	action, condition, list-entry, now-condition, phrase, property-value,
	storage, table-reference, variable

These all have internal meanings and it's unlikely to be safe to create anything with these names, though in some cases one might be lucky. (The example "Greater Variety", for instance, created a table column named "action" in 6L02 and got away with it; this column has been renamed. See bug report 0001347.)

It is now officially illegal to define a phrase which looks like "X is (a relationship) Y". For example,

	To decide whether (X - testval) is less than (Y - testval):

is now disallowed, because there's already a meaning of "To be less than". (See bug report 0001230.)

When replacing a heading from an extension, it is now possible to put the heading name in quotation marks for clarity. For example:

	Section - Another Questions fix (in place of "Section 4 - Phrase used to
	ask questions in closed mode" in Questions by Michael Callaghan)

(Without quotation marks, the grammar is ambiguous, because of the "in" in the name of the heading. See bug report 0001239.)

It's now legal to test actions against kinds of actions in a more flexible way. For example:

	Attacking is aggressive behaviour.
	Examining is inquisitive behaviour.
	[1] Before aggressive behaviour: ...
	[2] Before doing something other than aggressive behaviour: ...
	[3] Before aggressive behaviour or inquisitive behaviour: ...
	[4] Before aggressive behaviour or jumping: ...

Previously only rule [1] would have been allowed. (This was prompted by bug report 0001244, though that was arguably a suggestion in disguise.)

The "backtrace" problem messages arising from ambiguous possible phrases, which list what Inform was trying to read, have been redesigned a little.

The default contents of the following two responses have changed:

	list writer internal rule response (R)
	list writer internal rule response (T)

in each case to remove an open bracket at the beginning; this open bracket is instead displayed using list writer internal rule response (A) first. The practical effect of this is that only two changes are needed to make the list writer always use, say, square brackets instead of round ones:

	The list writer internal rule response (A) is " [bracket]".
	The list writer internal rule response (B) is "[close bracket]".

(See bug report 0001344, to which this is related.)

I6 template files can now be installed in Inform's external resources folder, in a subfolder called "I6T". Inform first looks for these in Project.materials/I6T, then in (external)/I6T, and lastly in its own built-in reservoir. This is a change nobody actually asked for, but it makes everything consistent since the same convention is followed for Language bundles, website Templates and Extensions.

The Inform application

Inform for Mac OS X

6L02 introduced an almost entirely rewritten user interface, and inevitably there were a few bugs: the Installed Extensions list redrew awkwardly, flashing content (0001238); entering full screen mode could leave the Find dialog stranded behind (0001252); save panels from the Welcome window were not sufficiently explanatory (0001273); clicking on extension names to bring up their documentation worked badly (0001237); unchecking the "bind up into a Blorb file on release" option on the Settings pane had no effect (0001306); Inform crashed on launch under Snow Leopard (0001271); IFIDs were not persistent, defeating their purpose (0001278); headings at the top of the source text were not correctly rendered on screen (0001331). These are all fixed.

Inform for Windows

A new option, "Generate Inform 6 debugging information", has been added to the preferences dialog. This option controls whether the command line used to run Inform 6 specifies that the debugging output file should be created, and defaults to "off".

The Extensions tab is now implemented, providing access to the Public Library.

"Create new project" buttons are present in the documentation, next to example projects.

The elastic tab-stops option is now "Auto-space table columns" in the preferences dialog, to match better how things work on OS X.

Bugs 0000210 and 0001362 have been fixed.

Inform for Linux

We would like to thank Vincent Petry, who has helpfully contributed packages for OpenSUSE Linux.

Inform for Android

For the first time, this build of Inform is available for Android: specifically, for Android 2.1 (Eclair) or later.

Maintenance

Core Inform maintenance

Around 100 bug fixes are made in this build, and once again all known issues have been resolved.

The following lists only the more significant bug fixes: it excludes those categorised by the bug tracker as "cosmetic", mostly small improvements to problem messages, or which affect only the documentation. I'm nevertheless grateful to all those who submitted these bugs, and in particular this build benefits from reports 0001229, 0001234, 0001246, 0001251, 0001259, 0001262, 0001263, 0001281, 0001289, 0001295, 0001299, 0001303, 0001308, 0001311, 0001316, 0001318, 0001321, 0001324, 0001327, 0001333, 0001334, 0001341, 0001342, 0001345, 0001352, 0001388.

(A special mention to 0001336 and 0001337 for some close proof-reading of the manuals, and another to 0001275 for pointing out that we confused the Swedish country code (SE) with its language code (SV) when putting together icons to indicate the language of play, which resulted in the flag of San Salvador making an appearance.)

Uncategorisable

• Bug fixed (0001339) whereby a really large source text might compile to I6 code containing spurious space characters which, with bad luck, might fall in the middle of a keyword and thus cause I6 errors. (This is only ever known to have occurred on a 3.6 million word source.)

• Bug fixed (0001249) whereby headings with multiple bracketed stipulations

  Section - Fruit (for use with Locksmith by Emily Short) (not for release) (for Glulx only)
  

  would produce spurious problem messages.

Assertions and creations

• Bug fixed (0001309) whereby assertions to set rule responses would be misread if the rule names included the word "with" or "having".

• Bug fixed (0001247) whereby assertions moving rules in rulebooks would sometimes be misread if the rule or rulebook names included the word "in".

• Bug fixed (0001373) whereby "The Attic is above the Parlor" would work, but "The Attic is a room above the Parlor" would make a connection the wrong way (up from the Attic to the Parlor rather than vice versa).

• Bug fixed (0001290) whereby some attempts to make map connections to constant values which aren't objects would be ignored (which is fair enough) but with no problem message (which isn't).

• Bug fixed (0001260) whereby an oddly-phrased sentence such as

  	X with the printed name "Cross" is a thing.
  

  would be read even more oddly as a declaration that all things have this printed name.

• Bug fixed (0001361) whereby the assertion "X is on top of Y" would sometimes be read as "X is on (top of Y)".

Model world

• Bug fixed (0001292) whereby the reaching inside/outside rules would not properly set the "person reaching" variable if the test were run other than via an action.

• Bug fixed (0001363) whereby "the direction of D from R" would produce a bogus result for a one-sided door.

• Bug fixed (0001243) whereby making scenery parts of a person would lead to a strangely worded problem message.

• Bug fixed (0001359) whereby the text substitution "[the player's surroundings]" would produce empty text before play begins.

Properties

• Bug fixed (0001228) whereby attempts to refer to an impossible property of an object (a property, that is, which can only belong to an object of a different kind) would not always be caught at compile time.

Relations

• Bug fixed (0001364) whereby a relation defined by a condition involving a test which, to resolve, would require the expansion of a text substitution, would fail with an internal error. (Such a relation is quite legal and now compiles properly.)

• Bug fixed (0001285) whereby route-finding through a various-to-one relation would fail to work in some configurations of the relationship. (That's probably being generous - when it did work, that was mostly luck.)

Rules and rulebooks

• Bug fixed (0001329) whereby a condition limiting the applicability of a rule might not be properly type-checked, causing internal errors in some cases.

• Bug fixed (0001280) whereby an attempt to put just a "value" into a rule's preamble would cause an unclear problem message.

• Bug fixed (0001323) whereby rules such as...

  	Before doing something other than listening to or examining the creature:
  

  ...would be misunderstood as (listening) to (or examining the creature) rather than (listening to or examining) (the creature).

• Bug fixed (0001296) whereby

  	[1] Instead of taking the rock or looking: ...
  	[2] Instead of looking or taking the rock: ...
  

  [1] was reported as a problem (the actions can't mix because "looking" can't apply to the rock), but [2] wasn't. To avoid ambiguities, both forms are illegal.

• Problem message improved (0001389) for getting the 'for...' and 'when...' clauses attached to a rule about actions in the wrong order.

• Bug fixed (0001328) whereby rules based on a parameter which happens to end with the word "rule" would sometimes have the parameter ignored, making them more widely applicable than intended.

Lists

• Bug fixed (0001387) whereby Inform wasn't preventing constant lists or texts from being modified using text replacement, list sorting and so forth. All such attempts now result in problem messages.

Tables

• Bug fixed (0001322, 0001338) whereby creating objects via a table which contained additional blank rows would generate spurious I6 errors.

• Bug fixed (0001360) whereby attempting to access a table row, where no row was selected, could cause TableLookUpEntry() to crash at run time. There's now a run-time problem message instead.

• Bug fixed (0001255) whereby looking up texts, lists, etc., in a table which contained a blank row before the match would sometimes cause memory out of range crashes at run time.

• Bug fixed (0001250) whereby it was possible to create the same column in two different tables with different kinds, provided that both columns started out empty; this resulted in mysterious type-checking problem messages.

• Bug fixed (0001390) whereby attempting to read a blank entry of a table as if it held a value would throw a run-time problem (as it should) but then also in some circumstances crash the virtual machine.

Equations, units and arithmetic

• Bug fixed (0001302) whereby real-valued constants of some kinds, notably those defined by the Metric Units extension, couldn't be written with a minus sign.

• Bug fixed (0001268) whereby local variables were not being promoted implicitly from "number" to "real number" when used in an equation. (The documentation half-promised that this would happen; well, now it does.)

• Bug fixed (0001310) whereby comparisons between values of a kind other than "real number", but nevertheless stored as floating-point quantities, would wrongly be made using integer comparisons.

• Bug fixed (0001257) whereby comparisons between real numbers and numbers would not always implicitly promote the numbers to reals before making the comparison.

Understanding

• Bug fixed (0001369) whereby a declaration of "Understand... as a mistake", with no error message text supplied, would sometimes crash Inform.

• Bug fixed (0001265) whereby an "Understand... when..." condition would throw a problem about referring to the current action even when it in fact tested whether actions had taken place in the past.

• Bug fixed (0001313) whereby a runtime error is thrown when the player's command is matched against the text "me", which doesn't qualify, on early turns only.

• Bug fixed (0001325) whereby the Understand token "[any K]", where K is a kind of value but not a kind of object, could sometimes produce an internal error.

• Bug fixed (0001301) whereby single-letter elements of literal patterns would fail to parse at the command line under Glulx if written in upper case. (Thus a command such as "heat the water by 5c" would work, but not "heat the water by 5C".) Note that this only affected commands typed by hand, because the TEST command flattens to lower case automatically.

Text, spacing and printing

• Bug fixed (0001242) whereby "blouse" and its derivations pluralized as "blmice", not "blouses".

• Bug fixed (0001231, but see also 0001396) whereby the text substitution "[A list of...]" would only capitalise the first word of the output if it were an article, so for example it could produce "four gold coins" rather than "Four gold coins". And similarly for "[The list of...]", which could be fooled by proper nouns in lower case.

• Bug fixed (0001258) whereby printing unusual indefinite articles using the "[A ...]" text substitution would produce a "library error 2" at run-time.

• Bug fixed (0001319) whereby a text substitution defined with a slash to indicate alternate phrasings on the opening word would lose its case sensitivity.

• Bug fixed (0001291) whereby string comparisons in the background would cause "[first time]..." text substitutions to behave unexpectedly when used in certain properties of rooms or things.

• Bug fixed (0001370) whereby the string "[one of]..." compares as equal to the empty text "" before being first printed, even if it's never possible for it to be empty. For comparison purposes, it now is equal to the text value it will have when next printed.

• Bug fixed (0001368) whereby spurious line breaks would sometimes appear in room descriptions including paragraphs arising from "writing a paragraph about" rules.

• Bug fixed (0001365) whereby grouping items under a given text would not always work if that text included substitutions. It now does, and automatically performs the substitution at grouping time.

• Bug fixed (0001344) whereby two oddball cases in the list-writer printed a close round bracket ")" directly, rather than printing it with the list writer internal rule response (B).

• Bug fixed (0001283) whereby the past tenses of regular English verbs ending -ay, -ey or -oy were incorrect: thus play was plaied, annoy was annoied, and so forth.

• Bug fixed (0001396) to do with capitalising "ÿ" in the Z-machine (Queensrÿche fans, beware).

Indexing

• Bug fixed (0001300) whereby the text "This text is not actually used" is actually used in the Actions detail view.

• Bug fixed (0001335) whereby the adjective "substituted" was wrongly defined in the Lexicon index.

• Bug fixed (0001332) whereby the Contents index was miscounting the number of words under some headings.

Testing commands

• Bug fixed (0001256) whereby the RESPONSES testing command would list responses from some extensions in more than one numbered chunk.

• Bug fixed (0001236) whereby run-time problem messages would sometimes be hidden on screen if they occurred during the expansion of a text substitution.

Releasing, bibliographic data, and cBlorb

• Bug fixed (0001293) to make HTML generated by cBlorb slightly better at passing validators.

• Bug fixed (0001253) whereby releasing along with the "introductory booklet" or "introductory postcard" had stopped working.

Extension maintenance

Glulx Text Effects by Emily Short (now maintained by Dannii Willis) has been updated to give comprehensive support for all Glk text features, and to simplify how colours are set, by using web (CSS) colours like #8800FF. See the extension documentation for more details. An issue to do with deprecated phrases in the examples has been resolved (see 0001367). This update is not fully backwards compatible, but any changes will be easy to make.

Metric Units: removed documentation references to the limitations which existed before we switched to floating-point arithmetic in 6L02.

Epistemology by Eric Eve: Updated to version 8. This fixes a bug (which has oddly only just come to light after all this time, unless it’s a by-product of 6L02) by which backdrops weren’t being marked as seen. It also adds an (A) to label the response of the report epistemic status rule.

Examples maintenance

Examples in the documentation which contained ampersands now paste correctly into the source panel (see 0001312).

Small revisions have been made to the examples Lethal Concentration 1 and 2 (see 0001341), Persephone (see 0001346), Terror of the Sierra Madre (0001340), Olfactory Settings (see 0001305).

The example "Lollipop Guild" has been rewritten to demonstrate removing implicit takes from a different action (since eating no longer mandates these); and it is more dentist-friendly into the bargain.

The tiny example "We" has been removed: responses and adaptive text have overtaken it (see 0001245).

The example "Greater Variety" has been renamed "Variety 2" to emphasise its sequelness (see 0001284).

Interpreter maintenance

Inform comes with browser interpreters built in, so that it can act on release instructions such as "Release along with an interpreter.", which tell Inform to make a website in which the current story is immediately playable.

Parchment, Quixe and Vorple, all included by default, are unchanged from their 6L02 versions.