joethephish's comments

Hey, I'm co-founder of inkle, the company that's developing it. It's not out yet, but I'd say it would be great for a bright 10-year-old!

Our release date is "Spring 2019", so it should be out very soon! We have a mailing list here if you want a notification when it comes out :)

https://www.inklestudios.com/heavensvault/

Hey - @joethephish here from inkle! Really cool to to hear that you're using ink for that :) Would love to know more detail about where this is being used if you're able to share!

Hey, Joe here from inkle! Sago's reply is really good, but broadly for those two specific languages: Ink is designed to be one component in a larger game engine - the runtime has a simple core loop of choice -> text generation -> choice. How you implement the UI is up to you (right now we have a C# runtime designed for usage in Unity). By comparison, Inform7 is designed for building standalone parser-based text adventures in the vein of Zork and its more modern successors.

Not sure what this proves exactly. For fun, here's a Javascript equivalent in 27, err, "lines":

    module.exports = function() {
        var atom = function(val) { return val instanceof Array ? false : true; };
        var env = {
            label:  function(sexpr, senv) { senv[sexpr[1]] = evaluate( sexpr[2] ); },
            quote:  function(sexpr, senv) { return sexpr[1]; },
            "==":   function(sexpr, senv) { return evaluate(sexpr[1], senv) == evaluate(sexpr[2], senv); },
            head:   function(sexpr, senv) { return evaluate(sexpr[1], senv)[0]; },
            tail:   function(sexpr, senv) { return evaluate(sexpr[1], senv).slice(1); },
            conc:   function(sexpr, senv) { return [evaluate(sexpr[1])].concat(evaluate(sexpr[2])); },
            "if":   function(sexpr, senv) { return evaluate(sexpr[1], senv) ? evaluate(sexpr[2], senv) : evaluate(sexpr[3], senv); },
            atom:   function(sexpr, senv) { return atom(sexpr[1]); },
            lambda: function(sexpr, senv) {
                return function(lexpr, lenv) {
                    for(var i=0; i<sexpr[1].length; ++i) lenv[sexpr[1][i]] = evaluate(lexpr[i+1], lenv);
                    return evaluate(sexpr[2], lenv);
                };
            }
        };

        var evaluate = function(sexpr, senv) {
            senv = senv || env;
            if( atom(sexpr) ) return senv[sexpr] !== undefined ? senv[sexpr] : sexpr;
            else return senv[sexpr[0]](sexpr, senv);
        };

        this.evaluate = evaluate;
    };

Example:

    var notlisp = require("./notlisp.js"); 
    var l = new notlisp();
    l.evaluate( ["label", "second", ["lambda", ["x"], ["head", ["tail", "x"]]]] );
    l.evaluate( ["second", ["quote", [1, 2, 3]] ] );