Different handling of apostrophes. For some languages like French,
Italian, maybe Spanish as well, it may be useful to be able to disable the
replacement of apostrophe by " and replace quote by something else ([quote] or
["], etc).

One exists for Writing with Inform, but it would be nice to have the Recipe Book in this format as well. (Or, if it exists, it would be nice to have it linked from the same place on the Inform website as WI.)

If someone is using the topic matching system and they type ASK EMMA ABOUT FISH., that doesn't match "fish" because of the period/full stop, but we obviously don't want to strip out punctuation until after we've done the first bit of parsing and separated commands and so on. It would be possible to fix this with Punctuation Removal, but it's such a common issue that it would be preferable for the standard library to handle it.

Currently, code like:

repeat with item running through things:
showme "Checking [item]: valid."

...will fail, claiming that the text substitution is a "temporary thing, long gone by the time it would need to be printed." But this is not in fact true in this case, and would be a useful thing to be able to check.

Manipulation of objects based on the heading in which they
occurred, as in

All rooms in Section - first floor (living area) are in the Ark Quarters.

or

If the player is in a room in Section - first floor (living area) then...

Currently, answering it that, telling it about, and asking it
about require that the person being talked to be touchable. It is proposed
that this be changed to "visible" instead. There are some implications for
the conceptual picture of what is going on - speaking in this way becomes,
perhaps, a less intimate act - but it seems more rather than less
realistic.

Requests to recompile and replay will not perform any actions taken in the last play-through prior to a "> restart" command being issued.

The ability to declare a column of a table to have a default
(non-null) value unless the author overrides this; as in

Table of Drugs
drug cost
a drug a price (usually $1.99)

For instance:

Before turning the hourglass:
if the time until the sand runs out is less than 3 turns:
instead say “There’s only a little sand left on top; you might as well let it run its course.”

This would require some additional syntax to determine whether this event is in fact scheduled at all; otherwise, checking for the time remaining until it runs out would have to return a runtime error.

It may be possible to optimize searches
and loops using relations that are declared to remain static from compile time
onward.

A quick way to write rules about actions in which the noun and second noun are equivalent, as in

Instead of tying the blue rope to the red rope or vice versa: ...

...so that gameinfo.dbg is available for debugging.

The ability to use a strict setting so that the compiler will catch
unnamed rules (as for extensions which ought to name all of their rules
for the convenience of subsequent authors).

To be able to compile a z-machine game within the IDE but devoid of the
testing commands, to allow full-sized z-code games to take full advantage of the
skein (etc). This would be in addition to the Use memory economy command,
intended for games very close to the z-code limits.