Walls and Noses

Example 370

★★★

Responding to "EXAMINE WALL" with "In which direction?", and to "EXAMINE NOSE" with "Whose nose do you mean, Frederica's, Betty's, Wilma's or your own?"

Suppose we want our game to respond to "EXAMINE WALL" with "In which direction?", and to "EXAMINE NOSE" with "Whose nose do you mean, Frederica's, Betty's, Wilma's or your own?"

For the case of EXAMINE WALL, we need a way to determine whether every item being disambiguated is a direction. We'll start by making a "matched" adjective which will identify items being disambiguated:

Play/modify in Borogove

Play in Quixe

"Walls and Noses"

Eight-Walled Chamber is a room. "A perfectly octagonal room whose walls are tinted in various hues."

Understand "wall" as a direction.

Definition: a direction is matched if it fits the parse list.

Definition: a room is matched if it fits the parse list.

Definition: a thing is matched if it fits the parse list.

Rule for asking which do you mean when everything matched is direction:

say "In which direction?"

Checking the parse list requires a bit of behind-the-scenes work with Inform 6. Fortunately, you don't have to understand this entirely in order to use the rest of the example:

To decide whether (N - an object) fits the parse list:
   (- (FindInParseList({N})) -)
 
Include (-
[ FindInParseList obj i k marker;
   marker = 0;
   for (i=1 : i<=number_of_classes : i++) {
   while (((match_classes-->marker) ~= i) && ((match_classes-->marker) ~= -i)) marker++;
   k = match_list-->marker;
   if (k==obj) rtrue;
   }
   rfalse;
];
-)

Now that we've defined our "matched" adjective, we can use it for other purposes as well -- even generating our own lists. Our second challenge was to respond to EXAMINE NOSE with "Whose nose do you mean, Frederica's, Betty's, Wilma's or your own?"

Here we need to change the way the question is worded (not "which do you mean" but "whose nose do you mean"). We also have to the names of the noses as they're printed in this particular context, so that they don't repeat the word "nose" over and over. And -- as a point of good English style -- we also want "your own" nose always to be last on the list.

For this purpose we may want to use the built-in "Complex Listing" extension, which allows us to print specially ordered lists. So:

Include Complex Listing by Emily Short.
 
Wilma, Betty, and Frederica are women in the Eight-Walled Chamber. Understand "lady" or "woman" as a woman. A nose is a kind of thing. A nose is part of every person.
 
Rule for asking which do you mean when everything matched is a nose:
   prepare a list of matched things;
   if your nose is an output listed in the Table of Scored Listing:
      choose row with an output of your nose in the Table of Scored Listing;
      now the assigned score entry is -1;
   say "Whose nose do you mean, [the prepared list delimited in disjunctive style]?"
 
Rule for printing the name of a nose (called target) while asking which do you mean :
   if everything matched is a nose:
      if the target is part of a person (called owner):
         if the owner is the player, say "your own";
         otherwise say "[the owner][apostrophe]s";
   otherwise:
      make no decision.
 
Understand "own" or "mine" as your nose.
 
Test me with "x wall / north / x nose / mine".

Test me with "x wall / north / x nose / mine".

Eight-Walled Chamber
A perfectly octagonal room whose walls are tinted in various hues.

You can see Wilma, Betty and Frederica here.

>(Testing.)

>[1] x wall
In which direction?

>[2] north
You see nothing unexpected in that direction.

>[3] x nose
Whose nose do you mean, your own, Wilma's, Betty's or Frederica's?

>[4] mine
You see nothing special about your nose.