inform VS magrittr

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.

R (yes, the statistics language) has exactly this.

You can literally extract the body of a function as a list of "call" objects (which are themselves just dressed-up lists of symbols), inject/delete/modify individual statements, and then re-cast your new list to a new function object.

I don't know why the original devs thought this was necessary or even desirable in a statistics package, but it turns out to be a lot of fun to program with. It has also made possible a wide variety of clever and elegant custom syntaxes, such as a pipe infix operator implemented as a 3rd-party library without any custom language extensions [0]. The pipe infix operator got so popular that it was eventually made part of the language core syntax in version 4.1 [1].

[0]: https://magrittr.tidyverse.org/

[1]: https://www.r-bloggers.com/2021/05/the-new-r-pipe/

In R (thanks to magrittr) you can now perform operations with a more functional piping syntax via %>%. This means that instead of coding this:

Try reading the documentation for magrittr.

Related note: the statistical programming language R has a library named magrittr to support the pipe operator.

About the pipe (%>%) symbol, it's provided by the magrittr package. The package documentation details how to use the pipe operator.

I was wondering what some good ways are to handle nested function calls without chaining them in long, ugly nested statements. I am looking for functionality similar to the pipe forward operator %>% in magrittr/R or |> in F#.

You may like R: https://magrittr.tidyverse.org

Agreed on everything else you said (especially the type safety stuff, it massively helps in production), but one correction: magrittr is absolutely in the tidyverse suite. It's not considered one of its "core" packages that it visibly tells you it loads, but magrittr is loaded when calling library(tidyverse) and development of the package is handled by the tidyverse team under their Github account: https://github.com/tidyverse/magrittr