"First off, it is really low level. From what I understand, not even the people at Infocom wrote raw zil. Instead, they used Lisp macros that generated zil."
Is there any evidence of this? The standard guide to ZIL (written as an in-house document at Infocom for new programmers [1]) presents it very much as if people would be writing it directly. It's also not that low level, only slightly more low level than Inform 6.
The way I understand it, ZIL at Infocom was a subset of MDL. More specifically, a subset that was easy to compile to the Z-machine. This means that during development, they'd mainly write ZIL code, but they'd do it in MDL, giving them access to the full powers of the Lisp during development. (Since MDL is an early Lisp.)
Sometimes during game development they'd make use of MDL macros that were not available in ZIL, and they'd then have to either macroexpand manually, or hard-code those macros as language features into their ZIL compiler (because ZIL is not quite a Lisp and does not have support for custom macros).
Again, this is the understanding I've pieced together in my head from various sources. I don't have the full picture! Maybe I should try to get in touch with the people who were there to ask them...
The article mentions the Z-Machine as the earliest fantasy console. I'm wondering whether CHIP-8 would qualify?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIP-8
"First off, it is really low level. From what I understand, not even the people at Infocom wrote raw zil. Instead, they used Lisp macros that generated zil."
Is there any evidence of this? The standard guide to ZIL (written as an in-house document at Infocom for new programmers [1]) presents it very much as if people would be writing it directly. It's also not that low level, only slightly more low level than Inform 6.
[1] https://archive.org/details/Learning_ZIL_Steven_Eric_Meretzk...
The source code for most Infocom games is public, they did write them in ZIL. https://eblong.com/infocom/
The way I understand it, ZIL at Infocom was a subset of MDL. More specifically, a subset that was easy to compile to the Z-machine. This means that during development, they'd mainly write ZIL code, but they'd do it in MDL, giving them access to the full powers of the Lisp during development. (Since MDL is an early Lisp.)
Sometimes during game development they'd make use of MDL macros that were not available in ZIL, and they'd then have to either macroexpand manually, or hard-code those macros as language features into their ZIL compiler (because ZIL is not quite a Lisp and does not have support for custom macros).
Again, this is the understanding I've pieced together in my head from various sources. I don't have the full picture! Maybe I should try to get in touch with the people who were there to ask them...
Oh. From the title I thought it would be the Z machine at Sandia labs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_Pulsed_Power_Facility
Sandia loves their references to Z division
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandia_Base
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-Division