Suggestions for Inform 7

One of the common (remaining) cases for procedural rules is to *conditionally* suppress library rules:

A procedural rule: if the Hat is worn, ignore the can't go through closed doors rule.

The compile-time way to do this is to delist the rule and replace it with an equivalent rule that does the same thing, sometimes.

I'd like a simple compile-time declaration for this:

The can't go through closed doors rule doesn't apply when the Hat is worn.

(Or equivalently: "The can't go through closed doors rule applies when the Hat is not worn" or "The can't go through closed doors rule applies unless the Hat is worn".)

This adds a condition to the existing rule, ANDed in with the existing condition (if it has one).

To be logically complete, throw in:

"The rule also applies when..." (ORs in a condition)
"The rule always applies." (deletes all conditions)
"The rule never applies." (equivalent to not-listed)

Dynamic object creation has been frequently requested, but we
have resisted because it would have to be a Glulx-only feature. Jesse McGrew's
Dynamic Objects extension offers some of these features, but would be
stronger if there were some kind of internal table or routine to look up the
data types of properties, global variables, and rulebook variables at runtime.

I can't help it ... I'm a software engineer first and an IF author much, much, much further down the list. I want to keep my Inform project in SCM (Source Code Management). I use Git, which has no problem with many of the normal problems (spaces in the file names, etc.).

However, it's a little hit-or-miss figuring out which files are (re)generated from the source, and which are not. Some guidelines would be nice, and if all generated files were put in a subdirectory, that would be even better.

The biggest challenge is the Skein. It's stored as a single file, which means that it gets changed on each execution of the game. This would work better if there were too files: a temporary file (not for SCM) that contains recent runs, and a blessed file that contains the portions of the tree that have been locked or blessed.

I have to say, I like being able to see the history (hits and misses) of my IF over time ... just like with my other program source code.

Currently, unlocks as a relation is defined so that only one key can unlock a given door. It's possible, but annoying, to hack around this. Why not rewrite the relation to relate various keys to various doors, and let authors create skeleton keys (applicable to several doors at once) or easily unlocked doors (on which several different keys work)?

Currently, printing the name of something in bracketed text (like [the orange] or [the list of round fruits]) marks it as mentioned, preventing it from appearing later-- except if this occurs within the room description itself. It would be nice if this worked within room descriptions, so workarounds like Mentioned In Room Description by Ron Newcomb are no longer necessary.

When a line is word-wrapped in a table, it would be nice if it aligned with its column rather than pushing all the way to the left. This would be especially helpful with topic/response dialogue tables, where the response may frequently run longer than one line. These tables may be lengthy and it can be hard to easily identify where rows begin and end.

Since this gets messy if inner columns align, perhaps this only applies to the final column in a table. Authors would then just need to save their longest lines for the last column, which they are probably doing, anyway.

The ability to define a null token in a list of alternatives in
Understand grammar, to match the existing ability to make a word optional
in a phrase definition. For example,

Understand "google for/-- [text] in/on [library computer]" as consulting
it about (with nouns reversed).

which could match "GOOGLE FOO ON COMPUTER" or "GOOGLE FOR FOO ON COMPUTER".

While there are other ways to achieve this effect, by defining new grammar
tokens, allowing "--" would be quicker and more legible.

A way to bookmark one's place in the Source text panel so that one
can quickly jump back to it. We propose to allow the user to set bookmarks in
the source, with shortcuts to jump back to the most-recently set; the bookmarks
would also be visible in the contents view of the source, and could be deleted
again.

The Mac IDE searches on exact strings, so "suppress banner" will ONLY find the exact string "suppress banner" as if there were quotes around the search term, rather than it being two separate words with an OR between them - my suggestion to fix that is to use quotes to denote specific strings that include spaces, otherwise treat the search as a list of words with OR. Using multiple words often results in no results because those words are never adjacent, or I can use single words, and with many common words I get so many irrelevant results that I can't find what I'm looking for.

Currently if we want to forget an
action with lots of synonyms, we have to do things like

Understand the command "hit" as something new.
Understand the command "kill" as something new.
Understand the command "attack" as something new.

...which is annoying, requires going through the indices to find all the
words accepted for an action, and always leaves the author with the
apprehension that maybe he hasn't caught all of them. And it's even worse
if we want to redefine, say, *only* "get off...", but not "get": since we
have to first forget "get" as a command, then *rewrite* the line that tells
Inform to understand get as taking.

Especially when creating global variables with descriptive names, the syntax is very awkward:

"The treasures remaining is a number that varies. The treasures remaining is 5."

A shorthand syntax would be helpful, such as one of the following:

The treasures remaining is a number that varies. It is 5.

The treasures remaining is a number that varies set to 5.

The treasures remaining is a number (5) that varies.

The 'list of' phrase only uses the description locally, so it would be safe to allow local variables there, similar to how they can be used in some of the file writing phrases.

For instance, this is currently illegal but could safely be made legal:

Home is a room.

When play begins:
let the place be Home;
let L be the list of things in the place;
say "Today's random list is: [L]."

A knife, a fork and a spoon are in Home.