In addition to TADS, I recommend you check out the Inform language and the introduction to Inform on that website, which also tells you a lot about how the Infocom adventures were implemented and how the grammar works.

In most cases, the feature set available through Inform will be total overkill for you, as you want to simply split up an (english) sentence into words and act upon the words. If you want to simplify and assume that all sentences are in the imperative form, then the first word will always be the action and the rest of the sentence (if any) will be objects belonging to that action. A different, also simplicistic approach would be stupid pattern matching where you specify (regular expression) patterns that get applied to the sentence entered to describe what you want:

my %action = (
  qr/^give (.*)(?:\s+(to) (.+)))$/ => \&give_to,
  qr/^go (.*)$/ => \&go_to,
  qr/^take (\w+)$/ => \&take_item,
);

while (<>) {
  my $matched;
  for my $pattern (keys %action) {
    if (/$pattern/) {
      $action{$pattern}->();
      $matched++;
      last;
    };
  };
  print "I didn't understand what you meant by '$_'.\n";
};

[download]

Of course, that will only get you so far, as the concepts of reference to the last sentence/object (look at banana. eat it.) and error correction (go nwrth. oops north.) won't be caught by this scheme, but for a simple start giving you quick results, this is a viable way.

In reply to Re: Writing a text adventure in Perl by Corion
in thread Writing a text adventure in Perl by Trag

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