ALAN ADVENTURE LANGUAGE Release 2.6 The Alan System is a special purpose computer language for creating interactive fiction aka. text adventures. The system consists of a compiler which compiles Alan source to an intermediate form and an interpreter that interprets such an intermediate form to enable the playing of the game. The Alan language has been designed to be easy to use with little requirements of programming skills, and to be safe, i.e. a game produced by the Alan system should not crash on the user. Distribution ------------ The Alan System is request-ware. The complete system is available without charge through electronic mail on request from alan-request@softlab.se Send an e-mail message with a single message body line like: SEND for a distribution package including demos and executables for , where currently must be replaced by one of: size packed and encoded (compiler + interpreter package) ---------- -------------------------------- AMIGA 132k + 70k SUN4 168k + 106k SOLARIS2 167k + 105k PC 190k + 154k MAC 185k + 127k HP 275k + 114k The current PC version supports MS-DOS (and Windows MS-DOS prompt) only on 386 and better processors. You may add the word ALAN or ARUN after the platform name to indicate if only the compiler or only the interpreter package should be delivered. Otherwise both will be delivered. E.g. SEND AMIGA ALAN will only send the compiler package for Amiga, whilst SEND MAC will deliver both the compiler and the interpreter packages for Mac. If you already have the interpreter package you need only to request the compiler package from the above address (SEND ALAN). The interpreter package contains the interpreter and some examples and is freely distributable. The documentation is also freely distributable (but copyrighted). Please forward this to friends or copy it onto any FTP-sites. But remember that the compiler may NOT be copied or redistributed. For complete copying conditions refer to the file COPYING in the distribution. Documentation ------------- You can request the the documentation by sending a single line email message containing: SEND where should be replaced by TEXT or POSTSCRIPT. Text format is sent as plain ASCII-text (187K), PostScript is compressed and uuencoded to 192k. The documentation is also available on WWW as Archives are distributed in various formats depending on platform. FTP-sites --------- The interpreter and documentation packages can also be found on the Interactive Fiction archive at ftp.gmd.de:/if-archive/programming/alan and its mirrors. NOTE however that compiler packages are NOT freely distributable, each delivered package will automatically be registered on the requestor in order to keep an up-to-date list of current users. Communication ------------- If you have any problems requesting or receiving the packages (especially the compiler) don't hesitate to contact the authors. You can contact the authors on the following email addresses: thoni@softlab.se gorfo@ida.liu.se All communication is welcome! Happy Authoring! The ThoNi & GorFo Adventure Factories