=========================== Foreword by Graham Nelson =========================== .. only:: html .. image:: /images/picI.png :align: left .. raw:: latex \dropcap{i} t would, I think, be immodest to compare myself to Charles Bourbaki (1816--97), French hero of the Crimean War and renowned strategist, a man offered nothing less as a reward than the throne of Greece (he declined). It may be in order, though, to say a few words about his fictitious relative Nicholas, the most dogged, lugubrious, interminably thorough and clotted writer of textbooks ever to state a theorem. Rather the way Hollywood credits movies for which nobody wants the blame to the director "Alan Smithee" (who by now has quite a solid filmography and even gets the occasional cinema festival), so in mathematics many small results are claimed to be the work of Nicholas Bourbaki. Various stories are told of the birth of Bourbaki, under whose name young Parisian mathematicians have clubbed together since 1935 to write surveys of whole fields of algebra. His initials, it may be noted, are NB. Some say "Bourbaki" was an in-joke at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (much as "zork" and "foobar" were at MIT), going right back to a practical joke in 1880 when a pupil successfully impersonated a visiting "General Claude Bourbaki". Folklore also has it that the real general was notorious when on manoeuvres for being able to eat *anything* if need be -- stale biscuit, raw turnips, his horse, his horse's hay, his horse's leather nosebag that the hay used to be in -- just as Nicholas Bourbaki would have to eat everything there was to eat in the theory of algebra, no matter how tooth-grinding or chewy. To give credit where it's due, Bourbaki's forty volumes are quite useful. Or, actually, they aren't, but it's nice to know they're there. It was on reading this present book that I realised the melancholy truth: that my own volume on Inform, the *Designer's Manual*, is a Bourbaki. It has to cover every last thing, from Icelandic accents to assembly language to fake actions, not to mention fake fake actions, to grouping together almost-but-not-quite-identical objects such as Scrabble tiles -- matters which a dedicated Inform designer might need to look up once in a lifetime, or then again might not. To be sure, the basics do turn up every so often, especially in Chapters II and III, but despite my best intention it is a gentle introduction only if you pick your way through as if on stepping stones. This book, on the other hand, is a follow-as-you-go tutorial, covering the basics thoroughly and a little at a time. Where the *Designer's Manual* tries never to retrace its steps, so for instance there is just one section on locations, the *Beginner's Guide* works its way through three whole games, giving it three chances to visit every subject, reinforcing and showing a little more each time. I should like to say that my first reaction, when out of the blue the authors sent me advance proofs, was to exclaim with delight at the lucid, uncluttered, sensible approach. Truthfully, however, that was my third reaction, the first being jealousy (it's all right for *you*, you don't have to document how the parser calculates GNA sets for noun clauses) and the second pique (you've cast the *gizbru spell: turn dangerous object into a harmless one* at my book). When it comes down to it, though, there is no greater compliment any writer can be paid than to have someone else choose to write a book about his work, so I thank Roger and Sonja for their gesture, as well as the fine job they have done. That is quite enough talking about myself, as Inform belongs to all its users, to the hundreds of serious writers of interactive fiction who find it helpful, and for almost a decade it has been a collective enterprise. Today nobody remembers who suggested what. Its world-modelling rules now resemble a New England patchwork quilt, to which each house in the village contributes one woven square. As you read this book, you might want to bear in mind that such a quilt is never finished, and always has room for one more square from a newly arrived neighbour. | |FILL| *St Anne's College* | |FILL| *University of Oxford* | |FILL| *April 2002*