I need help with plurality

[JansDog]

I copied and pasted plurality into the box and got an error because it used colons instead of dashes for section names. I fixed that no sweat but I am too stupid to understand what this error wants from me.

This is the report produced by Inform 7 (build 6G60) on its most recent run through:

In Section 1 - Output tokens for pronouns:

Problem. You wrote ‘Is-are of item prints “is” or “are” appropriately for the item, though this will likely not be necessary very often, given that is-are already picks up whatever thing was last named by the game’ : but assertions about the initial state of play must be given in the present tense, so ‘The cat is in the basket’ is fine but not ‘The cat has been in the basket’. Time is presumed to start only when the game begins, so there is no anterior state which we can speak of.

Any help would be much appreciated.

[matt_weiner (matt w)]

Did you copy and paste the extension code into your main program file? That’s not the way to include an extension; just write “Include Plurality by Emily Short” at the top of your code and the extension will do its work.

The particular error you just got looks like the game is trying to compile a sentence from the extension’s documentation. That shouldn’t happen if you just type the “Include” sentence I gave above; if you must copy the extension’s code into your main file, make sure you just copy the code and not the documentation. The code goes up to the line that says “Plurality ends here.”

I’m not sure about the colons/dashes issue, though lots of people use Plurality so I’d be surprised if it had a flaw like that. Make sure you have the most current version of the extension.

[vyznev]

You really shouldn’t need to copy and paste anything except the following single line:

Include Plurality by Emily Short.

Anyway, your error message looks as if you pasted some documentation text into your program without marking it as a comment, causing Inform to try parsing it. That’s quite likely if you copy-pasted some “pretty-printed” example code from the docs, since they tend to come with explanatory paragraphs scattered between pieces of code.

[JansDog]

Thank you for the help.