You can produce all the V6 assembly-language code with Inform, if you so
wish. The V6 Z-machine assumes that the interpreter has access to a
set of numbered pictures; this is the unportable part, not stored with
the story file, and of course Inform doesn't produce this part.
> : or even better - is there a way to call C functions from within Inform code?
>
> I doubt it as well, since the Z-machine format is infinitely portable and
> machine code is not.
Quite right. If you would like to do so, for a particular project that you
don't mind only working with a specially doctored interpreter, the way to do
it is to, e.g., modify the interpreter to call some routine of yours when,
say, one of the un-needed V6 assembly lines is run into; or when a character
with a wildly-non-ASCII code is printed.
This is as good a solution as you can reasonably expect given the portability
constraints.
Graham Nelson