The Brink Dialect

Vanilla ink is a weave language: knots, stitches, choices, diverts, gathers, and a thin logic layer (~ lines, conditionals, VAR/temp) for steering that weave. It has no arrays, no maps, no loops, no multi-line logic. Real stories often want those things anyway — tracking an inventory, iterating a quest list, building up a piece of interpolated text — and authors have been faking them with lists and stringly-typed hacks since ink shipped.

The brink dialect is a superset of ink that adds them properly: multi-line logic blocks, array/map literals, indexing, and a small mutating stdlib. It sits entirely inside the existing ~ logic channel — narrative, choices, and diverts are untouched — and it compiles to the same bytecode, run by the same runtime, as everything else.

This chapter covers:

• Enabling the Dialect — the --dialect flag, why strict-ink is the default, and what changes when you opt in.
• Logic Blocks — ~ { … }, the pure-logic fence, and what it deliberately can’t do.
• Collections — #[…]/#{…} sigil literals, and why they only work in expression position.
• Indexing & Mutation — a[i], a[i] = v, and the runtime faults that replace ink’s usual silent tolerance.
• Standard Library — len/keys/values/contains and the mutating push/insert/remove/remove_at.
• Types — gradual vs. strict, inline annotations, structs, and the visit-count idiom that survives strict mode unchanged.
• Conformance — how the dialect coexists with the oracle-anchored core, and what “authoring-time only” actually means.

The shape of the design

Three decisions run through every page in this chapter, so it’s worth naming them up front:

1. One grammar, two dialects. brink-syntax always parses the full superset — the dialect extensions included — so the parser, IDE, and formatter never need to know which dialect a project has chosen. Whether a construct is allowed is decided later, during analysis.
2. The extensions are pure logic. Everything new is data manipulation inside ~ — no new narrative, choice, or flow-control surface. A block computes; it never weaves.
3. Sigils, not new keywords. Collection literals use #[…]/#{…} precisely because # cannot begin an ordinary ink expression — the new syntax is unambiguous with existing ink wherever it’s legal to write.

The full ruling — including the alternatives that were considered and rejected — lives in docs/t1b-surface-spec.md. This chapter is the author-facing account of the same surface; when in doubt, that spec is the tie-breaker.