Like others have mentioned, I'd recommend either Tads or Inform over coding from scratch.
I also like Alan --
http://www.welcome.to/alan-ifThe Amiga version is rather out of date, however. If interested, I think the source code is available for Alan v. 3, so it may be an interesting option to port it to 3.1, 4, AROS, MorphOS, etc.
I did a bit of coding in Alan years ago, and although it's a little underpowered compared to Inform, it's a fun language.
I also wrote several text adventures using TACL and Visionary for the Amiga ages ago, and although they are pretty easy to use, they aren't up to par with modern day IF languages.
