§7.6. Reading and talking
A few actions apply not to items alone, but also involve what might be called conversation. The first is the one used for looking things up in books (which is conversation of a kind, even if the author is not present): "consulting ... about ...". For example,
After consulting the book about "grove", say "The Grove is a sacred yadda, yadda. There's a tree, that sort of thing. Wisdom."
After consulting the book about "future events", say "It's a bit, what's the word? Delphic."
Note that what follows "about" here is a piece of text in double-quotes, and not the name of something. It can be almost any text at all, and in fact we shall later see (in the chapter on "Understanding") that we can match complicated patterns of words, too.
Similar actions are used for conversing with people:
After asking the Sybil about "verses", say "She blushes."
After telling the Sybil about "persians", say "She nods gravely."
After answering the Sybil that "I am mad", say "She sighs."
These would be produced by commands like "ask sybil about verses", "tell sybil about persians" and "answer i am mad". Answering is little-used except that it also catches commands like "sybil, something unrecognized", which inexperienced players sometimes type. Asking and telling, however, are important actions and the difference between them is often worth preserving. If you would prefer to make "tell sybil about X" do the same as "ask sybil about X", the following rule would serve:
Instead of telling the Sybil about something, try asking the Sybil about it.
Games with a lot of conversation often involve great heaps of rules like the ones above, which can be repetitious to type out. We shall also later see (in the chapter on "Tables") that we can tabulate questions and answers in a much more concise way, if we prefer.
See Topic columns for table-based ways to store and retrieve conversation
Sometimes we do not particularly want to deal with all the variations on asking, telling, or answering someone something, but want to direct everything to a single conversational command:
And similarly, a difference between GIVE and SHOW is sometimes overkill:
It is also often the case that we want to accept more than one form of a term. For instance
will match either "Darius" or "king". If necessary, we can go a step further and define our own token to match a variety of phrases, like this:
The token "[Greeks]" will match all of "Athenians", "Spartans", "Greeks", "hoplite army", or "hoplite forces". It will not match "hoplite" or "forces" alone; it is important to note that the / divides individual words which are understood equivalently, but does not define entire phrases as equivalent. More about how Inform understands specific phrases can be found in the chapter on Understanding.
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Sometimes we do not particularly want to deal with all the variations on asking, telling, or answering someone something, but want to direct everything to a single conversational command:
And similarly, a difference between GIVE and SHOW is sometimes overkill:
It is also often the case that we want to accept more than one form of a term. For instance
will match either "Darius" or "king". If necessary, we can go a step further and define our own token to match a variety of phrases, like this:
The token "[Greeks]" will match all of "Athenians", "Spartans", "Greeks", "hoplite army", or "hoplite forces". It will not match "hoplite" or "forces" alone; it is important to note that the / divides individual words which are understood equivalently, but does not define entire phrases as equivalent. More about how Inform understands specific phrases can be found in the chapter on Understanding.
Sometimes we do not particularly want to deal with all the variations on asking, telling, or answering someone something, but want to direct everything to a single conversational command:
And similarly, a difference between GIVE and SHOW is sometimes overkill:
It is also often the case that we want to accept more than one form of a term. For instance
will match either "Darius" or "king". If necessary, we can go a step further and define our own token to match a variety of phrases, like this:
The token "[Greeks]" will match all of "Athenians", "Spartans", "Greeks", "hoplite army", or "hoplite forces". It will not match "hoplite" or "forces" alone; it is important to note that the / divides individual words which are understood equivalently, but does not define entire phrases as equivalent. More about how Inform understands specific phrases can be found in the chapter on Understanding.
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