Yesterday I wrote that tweets, being archived for future generations, could be enhanced by making them Inform 7 compliant. Not that everything on Twitter should be written in Inform, only that it would be very interesting to have a piece of interactive fiction added to this archive. Since tweets are 140 characters or less, they are roughly the same size as one line of code. Organizing a jumble of code could be extremely challenging, so they would need to be kept fairly basic.
To start, the hash tag #inform7 should be used at the beginning of your tweet to “initialize” it and make it available to the potential code base. If you use Twitter this shouldn’t be out of the ordinary for you. Similarly, if you use a language like perl or python, the convention of starting your code a # and a path to the interpreter shouldn’t be weird at all.
Inform code can be quite complex and describe very sophisticated relationships. For the purposes of using it for tweets it should be kept minimal, so I’ll only go over the very basics. However if you want to learn more advanced techniques, you can always read through the Inform 7 manual for a complete guide to this interesting language.
Inform resembles English sentences. Each line of Inform code is an “assertion” or a rule about the world you’re creating. The world starts as a formless, empty void; you must create every rule for how your story works. There are, however, built-in standard rules so you don’t have to describe the laws of physics, etc. for every story. If you’re familiar with programming languages you probably know about primitive data types. In Inform, the primitives are present tense verbs. The built-in primitives for Inform are the following:
You can create your own verbs, but for now you should only use these types.
So let’s write a “hello world” Inform 7 tweet! Remember to start with the hash tag, use the primitive data types (for now), keep it present tense, and keep it under 140 characters total.
#inform7 Iowa City is a room.
Not very exciting, but it’s a great start. Keeping with the interactive fiction convention, a ‘room’ is the term for an area of space. You can use the term ‘region’ to describe a larger area that contains a group of rooms.