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Yes. If you look at the ZILF compiler in particular, which is capable of compiling the original sources, there's a lot more MDL in there than you'd expect would
by KerrAvon 10mo ago
Yes. If you look at the ZILF compiler in particular, which is capable of compiling the original sources, there's a lot more MDL in there than you'd expect would be required for ZIL proper.
- taradinoc 10mo agoRight - that's because ZIL was more or less a _superset_ of MDL. ZILCH (Infocom's compiler) provided all the functions of MDL, _plus_ a bunch of new ones that manipulated data structures which were then used to generate assembly code for the Z-machine. One of those new functions, ROUTINE, accepted code written in a domain-specific language resembling a stripped-down MDL, which was then translated into Z-machine instructions. But that domain-specific language isn't synonymous with ZIL: other functions that were inarguably part of ZIL, like OBJECT and SYNTAX, are not part of that domain-specific language. IMO, the only reasonable definition of ZIL is "the language accepted by a ZIL compiler", which (depending on whether you look at ZILCH or ZILF) is either a superset of MDL or an overlapping set.