Text Adventure Development System (TADS) is a prototype-based domain-specific programming language and set of standard libraries for creating interactive fiction (IF) games.
From the late 1980s to early 1990s, free development tools such as TADS and Inform enabled amateur communities to create interactive fiction.
It has many new features, such as efficient dynamic objects (with automatic garbage collection), structured exceptions, native UTF-8 strings, and many useful function classes.
Games written in TADS are compiled to a platform-independent format that can be played on any computer for which a suitable virtual machine (VM) exists.
Such virtual machines exist for several platforms, and in this respect, TADS closely follows the example of the original Infocom Z-machine, as well as modern languages such as Java and C#.