{"id":276,"date":"2009-07-02T23:53:37","date_gmt":"2009-07-03T03:53:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/2009\/07\/plotkin-on-rule-based-if-programming\/"},"modified":"2009-07-07T00:34:14","modified_gmt":"2009-07-07T04:34:14","slug":"plotkin-on-rule-based-if-programming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/2009\/07\/plotkin-on-rule-based-if-programming\/","title":{"rendered":"Plotkin on Rule-Based IF Programming"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been meaning to write something deliberate and detailed about the May 3 Penguicon talk, <a href=\"http:\/\/eblong.com\/zarf\/essays\/rule-based-if\/index.html\">&#8220;Rule-Based Programming in Interactive Fiction,&#8221;<\/a> by Andrew Plotkin (a.k.a. Zarf). And I&#8217;m still waiting to do that. I didn&#8217;t want to wait any longer to mention the talk on here, though, since it is presented very well in its Web version and will be useful for many people. It&#8217;s an intriguing discussion of the other major idea behind Inform 7 &#8211; the one that isn&#8217;t &#8220;natural language&#8221; programming. The discussion of how to code interactive fiction is one I&#8217;ve been mulling over as I continue to work on <a href=\"http:\/\/curveship.com\">Curveship.<\/a> I think providing first-class representations of  actions is very helpful in dealing with some of the problems Zarf addresses, although it doesn&#8217;t solve everything by itself. And I think that having representations, within actions, of atomic events (such as exerting force on something and thereby touching it) deals with another of the problems that Zarf mentioned. But I&#8217;ll have to leave the extended discussion of that for another post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been meaning to write something deliberate and detailed about the May 3 Penguicon talk, &#8220;Rule-Based Programming in Interactive Fiction,&#8221; by Andrew Plotkin (a.k.a. Zarf). And I&#8217;m still waiting to do that. I didn&#8217;t want to wait any longer to mention the talk on here, though, since it is presented very well in its Web &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/2009\/07\/plotkin-on-rule-based-if-programming\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Plotkin on Rule-Based IF Programming&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3,15],"class_list":["post-276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-if","tag-programming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":285,"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276\/revisions\/285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}