Programming

We usually think of programming languages and their standard libraries as forming one coherent whole, and for general-purpose languages this might as well be the case. But in text adventure authoring systems the two are more divorced. Often, the language proper has few or no features specific to interactive fiction, and it's the library that makes it into an authoring system, properly speaking. Such is the case with TADS 3, which has recently acquired a new standard library called adv3lite and Inform 6, which has several alternatives, none especially popular.

This is a short introduction to the standard library for Alan v3. After reading this brief introduction you will probably want to have a look at the Alan Library Cookbook.

There are four files in the standard library. You should have them in the same folder as your source code file. Then, you can include the library by using the 'import' statement in your source code.

Here's a small code snippet, mostly to test automatic Alan source code formatting on the Alan Home site.

The code traverses a set of components of a structure, say a table, and makes each component list its content. 

-- Loop over all components in an instance or class
For Each c In components Of This Do
    "The table has" Say An c. "." List c.
End For.

 

What They Say

"Man, I just finished programming a little game with Alan, and let me tell you ALAN RULES!! It's so simple, *I* can program with it."

Rob Anderson