[I7] Library messages

[Graham Nelson]

[David's reply to my reply, copied again to the list.]

Graham,

> If the principle is that a naive reader should
> be able to guess what the code does, then regexp-like
> asterisks are mysterious. And in general, the more
> of these things that are created, the less it becomes
> true any longer that the whole thing is a natural
> language design.

Fair enough; I can see where you are coming from.
Users could always create their own abbreviations
if they wanted to. (Or there could be another extension
to provide abbreviations).

> I'm fairly unworried about annoying your existing
> users, I'm afraid

I think I agree, actually. (It's nice to blow things
up and start again from scratch sometimes ...)

> I've generalised this so that
> the first word of any text substitution is parsed
> case sensitively, provided the upper case form
> has been declared.

That's great; I didn't realise it did that.

>> There are lots of common English phrases an extension writer might  
>> want to use that don't necessarily occur in the standard messages,  
>> too. Maybe it would worth attempting to identify these and add them  
>> as well?
>
> Could you give some examples?

I guess my point is that whatever phrases are already included
are there by "coincidence", because some message happens to use
them.

For example, there is no "[this|these]" rule, but there are rules
for "[that|those]", "[that|they]" and "[that's|they're]".

I think it would be quite hard to create an exhaustive list of
variable English phrases people might need to use one day ...

> Oh yes indeed. We can supply you with intest, which
> is a Perl script for batch-testing Inform, but I think
> you need Cygwin and so on to do all this under Windows:
> David could probably help with that?

I have Cygwin, so that's not a problem.

Err, a question -- in what way would you like me to be
involved in this project? (I won't feel left out if I
don't do anything! Just wondering ...)

David Fisher