Last time, I talked about TADS 3 and Groovy. I noted that TADS 3 had features especially suited for IF—undo support, a concise, declarative syntax for game content, a special syntax for defining IF-style command-line grammar—and some other features I really liked, but that for some reason I still felt like I preferred Groovy.
Why? Not-invented-here syndrome, in a sense. The IF system I would like to work with is not nearly the system that the TADS 3 language and libraries help out with. Just to name a couple of cases, I dream of experimenting with undo history and parser grammar beyond what the TADS 3 system and grammar syntax support. This wouldn’t make TADS 3 a bad language for the job, but I expect this would make its domain-specific features into dead weight when they didn’t suit my needs, and when that happens I’m afraid I’ll find myself programming in a domain-limited equivalent of Groovy after all.
Since Then
Between the time I made that post and now, a few months have gone by, and I’ve done a lot of different things: Continue reading
Pipe Dreams 