Is there a low-keystroke way to convert a kind of value to a text so that I can do text transformations on it? It seems like there’s something I’m forgetting to do here but I can’t figure out what it is.
Quality is a kind of value. The qualities are grape, surly, Aquarius, sleepy, rapid, perceptive, and amorous.
A dial is a kind of thing.
The quality dial is a dial. The quality dial has a quality.
Understand "set [something] to [a quality]" as setting the quality of.
Setting the quality of is an action applying to one thing and one quality.
Check setting the quality of something:
if the noun is not the quality dial, instead say "You can't set that to a quality.".
Carry out setting the quality of the quality dial:
say "You carefully set the quality dial precisely to [the quality understood in upper case].";
now the quality of the quality dial is the quality understood.
Control Room is a room. The quality dial is a fixed in place dial in Control Room.
Inform chokes on the quality understood in upper case because a quality is, of course, a kind of value, not text. I’m reluctant to just define a helper function, though, because I’d then have to define a separate helper function for each of several dials in the same room, and this seems pretty redundant:
to decide what text is the capitalized version of (q - a quality):
decide on "[q]" in upper case.
to decide what text is the capitalized version of (s - a velocity):
decide on "[s]" in upper case.
to decide what text is the capitalized version of (c - a color):
decide on "[c]" in upper case.
… etc., where velocity, color, etc. are each also a kind of value.
It seems like there should be an easier way to do this so that I don’t need duplicate boilerplate to decide phrases for every kind of enumerated value, but I can’t figure out what that would be. Is there a way to implicity convert a kind of value to its string, besides putting it in brackets (which doesn’t work inside an existing text substitution), or is there a way to specify in the header of a to decide phrase that the parameter can be any kind of value?
You can put it in brackets and enclose the expression in quotation marks and assign this to a temporary variable. This seems to work:
Carry out setting the quality of the quality dial:
let Q be "[the quality understood]";
say "You carefully set the quality dial precisely to [Q in upper case].";
now the quality of the quality dial is the quality understood.
Actually, there is! It’s explained in the chapter “Advanced Phrases” (arguably the most advanced chapter of the documentation), section “Generic Phrases”.
In our case, we’d want sayable value:
To say capitalized version of (val - a sayable value):
say "[val]" in upper case.
Carry out setting the quality of the quality dial:
say "You carefully set the quality dial precisely to [capitalized version of the quality understood].";
(I changed the to decide into a to say, which I feel is more appropriate in that case, but I think you can keep the to decide and it’ll work the same.)
Darn it! If I’d taken two minutes to skim the contents of Writing with Inform, I could have skipped the time required to write up a minimal version and a question.
That’s exactly what I was looking for. Thank you so much!
Hats off to Natrium729 for elegance, but some may find a slight tradeoff of elegance (needing to prefix with “text of”) to their liking, because then the code will connect with the upper/lower/title/sentence case phrases already in the Standard Rules.
Less Elegant, More Integrated?
"Dialing In On Quality"
Quality is a kind of value. The qualities are grape, surly, Aquarius, sleepy, rapid, perceptive, laid back, and amorous.
A dial is a kind of thing.
The quality dial is a dial. The quality dial has a quality.
Understand "set [something] to [a quality]" as setting the quality of.
Setting the quality of is an action applying to one thing and one quality.
Check setting the quality of something:
if the noun is not the quality dial, instead say "You can't set that to a quality.".
To decide which text is text of (item - sayable value):
decide on "[item]".
Carry out setting the quality of the quality dial:
say "You carefully set the quality dial precisely to [text of quality understood in upper case].";
say "You carefully set the quality dial precisely to [text of quality understood in title case].";
say "You carefully set the quality dial precisely to [text of quality understood in sentence case].";
now the quality of the quality dial is the quality understood.
Control Room is a room. The quality dial is a fixed in place dial in Control Room.
Test me with "set dial to sleepy / set dial to laid back".
