inform VS TOGVM-Spec

Inform 7 is the most popular IF engine. The best place to download it in 2023 is from GitHub: https://github.com/ganelson/inform/releases

Releases can currently be found via this link: https://github.com/ganelson/inform/releases

Did you know Inform is now (finally) open source?! https://github.com/ganelson/inform

Inform 6 is still being developed, and Inform 7 went open source earlier this year: https://github.com/ganelson/inform

Here's the github repo, it was just open sourced last week. You can compile it from source now, and I imagine the UI frontends will be updated in a couple of weeks. IIRC, compiling directly to other languages is now possible, although I'm not sure how much that impacts your use case.

For those who don't know it, Inform 7 is the venerable "design system" for interactive fiction. It has been freely available for some time with the promise of a release as open source for some time now. Looks like that has happened.

Make each AST node an RDF node and then you can cram whatever information into it you want. That's the approach I've been taking with https://github.com/TOGoS/TOGVM-Spec/, anyway.

Of course, for conveniently and safely manipulating in memory in $programming_language, you're probably going to want to define some structs/ADTs/whatever that only contain the data a given compilation stage is actively working with.

I've been thinking that what I need is a system that allows me to quickly define different lower-level datatypes for representing different views of the conceptual types and automate, to some degree, translation between them, so then each part of the system can work with objects designed specifically to be processed by it with minimal fuss.

A technical reason for avoiding those specialized types might be that the computer then has to spend more time transforming from one schema to the next. I would think that in practice this isn't any worse than having to do a lot of null checks.

A more human reason is that it could bean a combinatorical explosion of AST types. I guess this is where my idea about lightweight variations comes in.

In TypeScript this kind of thing might not be so bad, since any object can be downcast with no cost to a type that contains a subset of the information, and variations on types can be easily defined without even necessarily being named, e.g. `ASTNode & HasResultType & HasSourceLocation`.

As far as graph-based languages and languages with arbitrary metadata and relationships between objects are concerned, I've been mulling over a language where expressions are represented as RDF graphs and that has built-in support for manipulating RDF graphs. I've use the concepts as an intermediate representation for functional expressions in a few different systems (including Factorio's map generator), but haven't yet had the motivation to really flesh it out into a full-blown language. https://github.com/TOGoS/TOGVM-Spec