Alan
An acronym for Adventure LANguage, Alan is an authoring system designed to make it easier for people unfamiliar with programming to write IF, or text-adventure games. It was created by Thomas Nilsson and Göran Forslund in 1985 and is updated and maintained by Thomas Nilsson.
The language features a self-documenting, English-like syntax, possibly inspired by COBOL, and several built-in classes of objects commonly used in IF. Version three of the system is currently under development and will add a few more programming constructs to the language and allow users to create their own classes of objects.
10-Sep-2005: Alan version 3 goes Alpha! Alan 3 introduces object orientation (eg: classes, properties, inheritance) and other new features. Although it is still easy to learn, Alan 3 is not fully backwards-compatible with Alan 2.