Inform is an assembler for Infocom version-3 format story files.  It has
some of the trappings of a compiler, though its code is still haphazard
in some places.  It reports errors strangely at times, and in particular its
expression evaluator has a few eccentric mannerisms.  Some features one
might expect from a compiler are flagrantly missing.  Worse yet, much of
the source code is still written in a naive and unsystematic fashion.

  On the bright side, it works most of the time, and runs in only two
passes.  (This may sound easy but is not, because the story file format
requires all manner of tricky operations to be done: for example, the
dictionary must be alphabetically sorted, and the code must know absolute
addresses of its entries... and the address of the start of the dictionary
depends on many other things not known during pass 1... and so on.)  It
produces "Curses", the author's game, correctly.  This is a fairly
strenuous test since the game is about 123K long and pushes most of the
version-3 format to the limits.

  Included in this release to comp.binaries.acorn are the manual to Inform,
the two source files "dejavu" and "hellow", and two executables: "Inform"
and "Inform(SM)" the second of which has been compiled with a small memory
model, and temporary file slaving, which reduces it's wimpslot size from
~800k to ~224k. If you have a 1 meg machine (or regularly run low on memory)
try running Inform(SM) rather than Inform.

                                                              Graham Nelson
                                                   Magdalen College, Oxford
                                                                 April 1993