Alan Libraries

A brief history of the various libraries that were created for ALAN in the course of the time.

Tristano's Note — Having joined the ALAN community when Anssi's StdLib 2.1 was already the new established library, I haven't had any actual experience with previous versions of the ALAN Library. The following information might be inaccurate. Corrections and updates are most welcome.

Some Background on the Libraries

From what I've gathered, the evolution of the ALAN standard libraries is roughly as follows.

• The original ALAN Library, up to v0.4.0 (2001–2002), was designed for ALAN 2.
• ALAN Library v0.4.1 was ported to work with ALAN 3, and was updated up to v0.6.2 (2002–2007).
• ALAN Standard Library 1 (2010–2011) was a new library design (redesign?) by Anssi Räisänen, where the library code was organized into four main sumodules.
• The ALAN Standard Library 2 (2016–) was designed by Anssi Räisänen, this being a new library altogether, targeting specifically ALAN 3 new features and introducing extensive features in formally organized library structure. This is the current ALAN Library in use today, v2.1 being the latest release.

All three libraries are distributed under the Artistic License 2.0.

ALAN Library v0.6.2

The original ALAN Library, up to v0.6.2 (2007) was the result of the collaborative joint effort of Göran Forslund, Stephen Griffiths and Thomas Nilsson (now Thomas Nilefalk).

The library used to be hosted in the ALAN repository, up to commit c44766fa (2017-04-17), after which it was removed from the repository and hosted elsewhere (e.g. the old ALAN-IF Yahoo list, and possibly elsewhere too).

A fully functional version of the latest ALAN Library v0.6.2 can now be found in the Alan Goodies project, with minor fixes by Tristano Ajmone that resolved a couple of small bugs:

• https://github.com/alan-if/alan-goodies/tree/master/libs/ALAN-Library_0.6/

Although still fully functional with the latest ALAN 3 release, it's now mostly used for legacy purposes, to compile old adventures that depend on it, since it doesn't take advantage of many new features that were added to ALAN in the course of time (the library was last updated circa 2007).

ALAN Standard Library 1

The ALAN Standard Library 1 was designed by Anssi Räisänen.

The full library is available at the Alan Goodies project:

• https://github.com/alan-if/alan-goodies/tree/master/libs/ALAN-Stdandard-Library_1.00/

ALAN Standard Library 2

The new ALAN Standard Library 2 (aka StdLib) is the work of Anssi Räisänen. It's still actively developed, on GitHub:

• https://github.com/AnssiR66/AlanStdLib