This week’s prize, Bubbling Beaker Award® #28, is presented to Aaron Reed (@aaronius). Aaron Reed is the author of the game Blue Lacuna (among many others) and the book Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7. In this award-winning post from 2011, he looked into the problem of trying to make parser failure more intelligible to the untutored player, and in doing so dug deep into the parser code to tinker with the parts that decode a game’s recognizable grammar lines. This portion of the code has very limited documentation outside the code itself, much of it found in the obscure Inform Technical Manual.
This is the first BBA awarded to aaronius. Congratulations! The code in the post has unfortunately been a bit mangled by the forum’s conversion, but it will work more or less as-is once proper spacing is restored and em-dashes are converted back to double hyphens (--) when part of array access constructions. I believe that this technique (or its refined successor), along with many other pioneering user interface experiments, became part of the Smarter Parser extension, so it’s recommended to just look at that.