Programming a development tool for Greek interactive fiction
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Date
2026-07-01
Authors
Αβραμίδης, Χριστόφορος
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Abstract
This thesis details the design, implementation, and empirical evaluation of Aesop, a specialized development framework and runtime architecture designed to support the morphological and syntactic complexities of Modern Greek within Interactive Fiction (IF) systems. Traditional IF engineering paradigms rely on architectural blueprints optimized for analytic languages like English, featuring low morphological inflection and rigid word order. Consequently, these systems use static, single-string property models for entity identification, failing to natively handle noun declensions, head-modifier agreement constraints, and contextual euphonic mutations inherent to fusional languages. To address these limitations at the engine level, the Aesop framework introduces an inflected object model that embeds grammatical cases, genders, and numerical forms within its type system. The architecture integrates a declarative Domain-Specific Language parsed via a Context-Free Grammar, a multi-stage ahead-of-time compiler pipeline executing lexical and syntactic analysis, and a sandboxed, stack-based virtual machine implemented in Rust. Rust was selected specifically to leverage its expressive type system for modeling complex linguistic structures, alongside its compile-time memory safety guarantees. The runtime engine utilizes orthographic normalization filters to handle case-folding and accentuation variants, processes syntactic commands into independent execution trees to manage coordinate noun phrase chaining, and introduces a non-blocking state suspension mechanism to resolve semantic ambiguity through context-aware interrogation menus without destructive stack unwinding. Evaluation via an automated verification test bench validates the runtime safety of the virtual machine stack boundaries, the accuracy of the dynamic head-modifier synthesis, and the resilience of the processing pipeline against extra-grammatical noise. Structural limitations regarding the engine's current rigid linear grammar template are analyzed, outlining future development pathways toward non-directional dependency parsing and contextual clitic anaphora tracking.
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Keywords
Virtual machines, Computational linguistics, Compilers, Rust, Interactive fiction