David A Cornelson

White Paper on Sharpee Interactive Fiction Engine January 2026 Abstract Sharpee's Capability Dispatch system solves a fundamental problem in extensible software: how do you allow third-party code to modify the behavior of standard operations without sub-classing, monkey-patching, or invasive hooks? This paper describes a pattern combining double dispatch,

Classic IF Systems and Sharpee A detailed comparison of how TADS, Inform 6, Inform 7, Hugo, and Sharpee handle the journey from player input to executed action. Overview All parser-based IF systems solve the same fundamental problem: transform natural language input into game actions. The solutions share common ancestry but

In the process of porting Dungeo to Sharpee, we got to a completed implementation, but some unit tests missed important steps. When I started a "walkthrough" test in phases, we discovered a glaring gap in my grammar and parser implementation. I should say fundamental misunderstanding of what the

The port of mainframe Zork is nearly complete, but I keep running into things that impact the platform so I get sidetracked into improving Sharpee over finishing Dungeo. Scoring The most recent refactor from the port of Zork was how we enable scoring in the platform and how the author

It took all night to get it right (I'm new to npm publishing), but a beta version of Sharpee is now available: npm install @sharpee/sharpee@beta This is a standalone release of the primary eleven packages authors will use to develop stories, though the current text-service and

Updated: Jan 2, 2026 Even though I had designed and implemented a robust grammar and parser system for Sharpee, many standard use cases were not implemented. In the process of porting mainframe Zork, the grammar for INCANT x y (raw text in both cases) exposed a severe weakness in my

In order to truly dog-food a platform like this, you eventually have to build it into one package "sharpee.js" and then develop against that package. This was just achieved: === Bundling Sharpee === Building Sharpee packages... Scope: 12 of 22 workspace projects packages/core build$ tsc packages/core build:

In order to test the port of Dungeon (mainframe Zork) to Sharpee, I obviously needed a testing infrastructure. I had already implemented a transcript system that allows the author to create .transcript files and run the test harness. This is the transcript file for the mailbox: title: Mailbox and Leaflet

In 1979, I was a sophomore in high school and computers were things you saw on TV. I was the 2nd baseman of our varsity baseball team and it was raining after school, so coach paired us off and we played catch in the hallways with hard rubber baseballs. Jeff,