Parser

From IFWiki

A computer program or portion of a program that analyzes a string of characters in order to recognize grammatical units. Joseph Weizenbaum's Eliza (1966) and Terry Winograd's SHRDLU (c.1970) are two of the best-known early interactive programs that had parsers.

Early IF, including the original Adventure, used a two-word parser that only looked at the first few characters of each word. More recent IF parsers, following the lead of Dungeon aka Zork, have an Infocom-type parser that can understand longer words and more complex commands, but the genre is still a long way from using natural language processing to achieve complete understanding of all English inputs.

Modern IF programming languages include a parser as part of the authoring system, removing the need for the programmer to write a homebrew parser.

Links

• Discussions about parsing on the rec.arts.int-fiction newsgroup
• Survey of IF systems on the TADS 3 mailing list ..
  • Parser / execution system of TADS2, Inform 6 and Finch
  • Parser / execution system of TADS3 (as of July 2005)
• if yr cmptr cn rd ths... by Shay Addams for Computer Entertainment, August 1985. Details the mid-80s "parser war" between various publishers of text adventures.