A modest extension of C used by the Inform project.

• §1. The InC language

§1. The InC language. InC is only a little extended from regular C. All of the Inform tools are written in InC, as is the foundation module of utility routines built in to Inweb. It's probably not sensible to use InC in a web which does not import foundation, and it's certainly not possible to import foundation on a web not written in InC. So the two go together.

§2. Though this is really a feature of Inweb rather than InC, and is also true of regular C webs, functions, definitions and typedef structs need not be declared before use. In this way, the need for header files can be avoided altogether.

§3. Each section of an InC web can, optionally, begin:

    [Namespace::] The Title of This Section.

rather than, as normal,

    The Title of This Section.

That declares that all functions in this section must be have a name which begins with Namespace::. For example,

    int Namespace::initialise(void) {
        ....
    }

Inweb will not allow a function with the wrong namespace (or with none) to be declared in the section. This rudimentary feature enables the different sections of the web to behave like packages or modules in languages which support rather more compartmentalisation than standard C.

The tangler converts these identifiers to regular C identifiers by converting the :: to __, so in a debugger, the above function would look like Namespace__initialise.

Namespaces can be "nested", in the sense that, for example, we could have:

    [Errors::Fatal::] Handling fatal errors.

§4. The foundation module contains a suite of utility functions for handling strings and streams of text. These are unified in a structure called text_stream, so that strings in InC webs are almost all values of type text_stream *. InC provides one convenient feature for this: the notation

    text_stream *excuse = I"The compiler is not feeling well today.";

creates a string literal of this type. (This is analogous to ANSI C's little used syntax for "long strings", which is L"like so".)

§5. The words module, a component of the Inform compiler which is not included in Inweb, defines natural-language grammars in a notation called Preform. Inweb contains support for writing these directly into code; any paragraph whose code section makes use of this feature is automatically tagged ^"Preform". This is not the place to document what Preform notation means, but for example:

    <declaration> ::=
        declare <dominion> independent  ==> { R[1], - }

    <dominion> ::=
        canada |
        india |
        malaya