When the game asks the player “Which do you mean, the abc or the xyz?” I don’t want it to refer to a certain item by its printed name (e.g. “abc”), but by something else (e.g. “def”). (At all other times, I’m happy with the printed name.) Elsewhere on this site, someone suggested using code like this:
Before printing the name of the abc while asking which do you mean: say “the def”.
However, that results in, “Which do you mean, the defabc or the xyz?”
I tried changing “Before” to “Instead of”, but that results in a Problem:
“You wrote ‘Instead of printing the name of the abc while asking which do you mean’, which seems to introduce a rule taking effect only ‘while asking which do you mean’. But this condition did not make sense, so I am unable to accept this rule.”
Can we make the game refer to something by different text when it asks the “which do you mean” question?
As you can see, the ‘before printing the name of rule’ is actually behaving literally - printing the text you specified right before it prints the name of the abc.
You just need the plain old
Rule for printing the name of the abc while asking which do you mean: say "the def".
18.3 in the docs explains what rules you can write about an activity. In other words, printing the name of is an activity, and it turns out it has before and after rulebooks, but no ‘instead of’ rulebook, explaining why your instead idea didn’t work.
Also have a look at 18.10, which gives some explicit help with ‘rule for printing the name of’. Fortunately this is an activity where there are lots of little examples sprinkled throughout the docs, as well.
PS - I didn’t test my code, but I’ve got a feeling you may find when you use it, you end up with a ‘which did you mean’ list which says something with two articles. Like it might say ‘a the def’, or ‘the the def’. In which case, remove the “the” from the rule’s say phrase.