Animate vs. Inanimate

Authoring General Design Discussions
1

I’m trying to make it so that if you talk to something inanimate, it will prompt a funny reply.
This is the code:

Instead of talking to [something]:
if the noun is not animate:
say “Houston, we’ve got a problem in the ol[’] coconut.”;
rule succeeds;
otherwise:
continue the action;

But this does not work. When I run the program it says:

Problem. In the sentence ‘if the noun is not animate begin’ , I was expecting to read a condition, but instead found some text that I couldn’t understand - ‘noun is not animate’.

So if I can’t say “not animate”, what would I use instead?

2

I think you want “If the noun is not a person.” Looking at (the old) Appendix A, “person” is meant to cover anything animate enough to talk to, and includes animals. It shows up in error messages but I don’t think it’s defined as a default in code itself.

(It appears that “animate” does have a meaning in I6 code, but I don’t do I6.)

3

Ah. Thanks. It just seems like I would be able to fix it via what the error reports say… Right? Guess not.