A patch release of Inform 6.13

[Graham Nelson]

How to patch Inform 6.12 to 6.13
================================

Apologies for this unorthodox means of distribution. But two minor
defects have been found in 6.12 which I'd like to put right quickly:
one bug, one compilation difficulty. As the changes can be made with
a text editor in about two minutes, I'm simply circulating the
changes, though the corrected source code will reach ftp.gmd.de in
due course.

"text.c", lines 373-4:

d1 = character_digit_value[text_in[i]];
d2 = character_digit_value[text_in[i+1]];

should read

d1 = character_digit_value[text_in[i+1]];
d2 = character_digit_value[text_in[i+2]];

and this will fix the problem of not being able to compile string
escapes like "The door leads @00.", as used in the example game "Museum
of Inform".

"chars.c", line 88-91:

char *alphabet[3] = { /* The alphabet table. */
"abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz",
"ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ",
" ^0123456789.,!?_#'~/\\-:()" };

should read:

char alphabet[3][27]; /* The alphabet table. */

"header.h", line 1714:

extern char *alphabet[3];

should read:

extern char alphabet[3][27];

The ANSI C standard doesn't require that strings defined explicitly
are writable: so on some machines, the definition in 6.12 caused
memory exception errors. E.g., the "gcc" compiler needed the option
"-fwritable-strings" set in order to stop 6.12 from crashing out.
(Note that the array dimensions 3x27 allow room for a null character
terminating each row of letters.)

Finally, the version numbers at lines 33-4 of "header.h" should now be:

#define RELEASE_DATE "5th April 1997"
#define RELEASE_NUMBER 1613

Apologies all round.

--
Graham Nelson | gra...@gnelson.demon.co.uk | Oxford, United Kingdom

[Robert A. Pelak]

Just a quick post to inform Mac users that Inform 6.13 for 68K and
Power Macintoshes are now avaialble from ftp.gmd.de. The front end
is the same except to fix a bug that allowed multiple console windows
to appear under certain circumstances.

Robert

[Jay Goemmer]

And now, an utter newbie's perspective of current events:

Three weeks ago, I downloaded my first copy of Inform (v6.11).
Since then, there've been two compiler upgrades and one library
update.

--My head is spinning ("Oy!") . . .

Thanks, Graham, for your undying faithfulness to maintain your
program. Thanks too, to Bob Newell, for providing the DOS port
. . although it doesn't look like he'll get much rest if updating
is going to be a weekly occurrence. ;-D

Best wishes to all Informers,

--Jay Goemmer