Is there a list of all adaptive verbs that Inform knows by itself?
So I don’t have to bother with those it already knows, in tenses and viewpoint and such.
I just spent ten minutes looking to make [adapt the verb to be in the past tense from the first person singular] work before realizing inform doesn’t call it “to be” it uses the royal we form and thus knows it as [adapt the verb are in the past tense from the first person singular] .
yes i found index-phrasebook-verbs but how do they work? [are] i now figured out, but “to be able to see” ? o.o And are they all of them?
Because I don’t see “provoke” there but from the documentation §14.9 it is included and it works but it’s not in verbs… o.o
PS in the index, phrasebook, list of values, list of objects with indefinite articles:
it says “with definite articles” but that should be “indefinite articles”, right? was that a copy past from the one just above it?
Inform knows a lot of verbs! According to the 6L01 changelog
(Disregard that last bit, as the syntax specification seems not to have been published where anyone can find it.)
So many many verbs will work properly out of the box. Just about anything you can think of in English. I think in general the verb form is the first-person plural form, which for almost everything but “be” is the infinitive. (Well, modal auxiliaries like “can” to, since they don’t have infinitives.)
You can get a list of all defined verbs like this:
When play begins: say the list of verbs in brace notation.
However, it isn’t the case that to use any verb not on that list, you have to specify all of its forms explicitly. Inform can deduce the correct forms in most cases, which I think is what matt w was saying. All you need to do is tell Inform that the word is actually a verb. To use an example from the documentation:To retrofit is a verb.
When play begins:
now the story tense is past tense;
say "[The player] [retrofit] [Foo]."This correctly prints “You retrofitted Foo.”, even though we didn’t specify the past tense form of the verb (observe that Inform didn’t just tack on an “-ed”, but correctly doubled the last “t”). So in general to use verb X you can just try “To X is a verb.” first, and only specify its other forms if Inform gets them wrong.
And I can only think of two ambiguous cases that Inform can confuse by default: “lie” (which is conjugated as “to tell untruth” instead of “to rest”) and “fly” (which is conjugated as “to hit a baseball upward” rather than “to move through the air”). All other nonmodal verbs I’ve tried have been interpreted correctly.
By default it makes the past tense “flied” rather than the irregular “flew”. That’s correct for the baseball one, but not for the general one. (More likely it was an oversight on the developers’ part than an intentional choice though.)
That’s a bit surprising, as this suggested that Graham was going to squash the baseball version in favor of the irregular one, presumably as revenge for the Zork II which inspired an entire clause of the Player’s Bill of Rights. (Or because “fly/flew/flown” is much more common.)
…in fact, I get the irregular conjugation: this source code
[code]To fly is a verb.
The Oddly-Angled Room is a room. “Many people came here and [adapt the verb fly in past tense] out.”
[/code]
In that case ignore me, I don’t have the latest version of Inform on this machine. I didn’t realize it had been changed. (Matt, does “lie” now give “lied” or “lain” or “laid”? EDIT: or “lay”?)
You’d want “lay” for the past tense of “to lie down” (“laid” is for the past tense of “to lay [something] down”). English: who even knows like what even.
ed: It goes with the regular/intransitive version in 6L38 – lie → lied
It can’t be that easy, can it?
I’ll give it a go, fail, and come back to complain.
The lay down thing I can understand in the sense of dropping an item being more used in IF than telling porkies, but the flying thing is just like wtf.
It sounds like that was a bug which is now fixed. And “lie” works properly in the present tense, it’s only ambiguous in the simple past. EDIT: And the perfect.
Never fear! The old way of specifying verb conjugations still works, though it isn’t in the documentation anymore. So you can write:
[code]To lie (he lies, they lie, he lay, it is lain, he is lying) is a verb.
Void is a room. “Nothing [adapt the verb lie in present tense] here. Nothing [adapt the verb lie in past tense] here yesterday either. And nothing [adapt the verb lie in past perfect tense] here the day before that.”[/code]
and it produces the proper output. The only situation in which you’re up the creek is if you need to use both “lie on the ground” and “lie through your teeth.”
(Also, Draconis was mistaken about the perfect tense–it’s “has lied” and “has lain” depending on which you’re using.)
…and yeah, I completely had to look up whether that was “lain” or “laid.”
