[rfk-dev] folding in NKIs from the inform edition

[David Griffith]

On Wed, 31 Oct 2012, Eric S. Raymond wrote:

> Peter A. H. Peterson <pedro at tastytronic.net>:
>> Again and as always: the choice is not just up to me. I would
>> really like to see the best of the Inform NKI included in the Mayan
>> Apocalypse release, but there are so many of them I think we have to
>> have some way to chip away at it.
>
> I have a slightly different concern.  I would like the ports to be
> refactored so there is just one NKI file in the distribution that all
> of them use.  In some cases this might involve writing machinery to
> massage it into native string-array initializers.

I've pulled in NKIs from the POSIX port whenever I found a new crop of 
them.

A massager is necessary for Inform.  Because of the design of the 
Zmachine, the Inform port is incapable of using an external NKI file.  NKI 
messages are generated by a huge switch() statement.  Here are the first 
few lines:

[ lookup_msg num;
         switch(num) {
1:      return "~I pity the fool who mistakes me for kitten!~, sez Mr. T.";
2:      return "That's just an old tin can.";
3:      return "It's an altar to the horse god.";

-- 
David Griffith
dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu

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