I6: variable set to dictionary word, how to get to its text?

Authoring Inform 7
1

I’ve been searching the documentation on this but haven’t come up with an answer yet.

Suppose you set a variable (actually, a constant) to a specific dictionary word, like so:

Constant TEST_WORD = 'test';

What is actually stored in the constant? Is it the dictionary address of the word?

What I’m really looking to do is print the text for the associated word. I thought that TEST_WORD would be set to the dictionary address of ‘test’, so that I could just say:

print (address) TEST_WORD;

to print the string “test”, but something seems to be going wrong. Am I right about what’s stored in TEST_WORD (in which case I need to look at what else might be causing the issue), or am I wrong (in which case I’m wondering how it’s possible to convert whatever’s stored in TEST_WORD into an address)?

2

Yes.

You’re right, and you need to look at what else might be causing the issue.

Constant Story "PRINTING A DICT WORD CONSTANT";
Constant Headline "^An Interactive Example^";

Include "Parser";
Include "VerbLib";

Constant TEST_WORD = 'test';

Object Start_Room "Start Room"
  with description "This is the starting room.",
  has light;

[ Initialise;
  location = Start_Room;
  print (address) TEST_WORD, "^";
];

Include "Grammar";
3

Thanks, vlaviano. What I was really after was a way to convert the contents of the variable/constant in I6 to a string at the I7 level. This seems to work for basic comparisons:

To decide which text is test word: (- print (address) TEST_WORD; -).

so things like

if "[test word]" is "test"...

evaluate to true, but it doesn’t work for things like:

say "The test word is [test word]."

Is there another way to cast this to an I7 string that doesn’t involve using the I6 print function?

4

No, you have to use the I6 print function in some way. There are ways to convert directly to an I7 string, but it’s messy and I never remember.

This works better:

To say test word:
     (- print (address) TEST_WORD; -).

When play begins:
	if "[test word]" is "test":
		say "Yes it is.";
	say "The test word is [test word]."
5

Thanks, zarf.

Any hints about which rabbit holes (in terms of documentation and keywords) to go down to try to figure out how to do this the hard way? I am very curious about how to do this, even if it is messy.

6

It is not a matter of documentation, it is a matter of looking at the I6 code and finding a routine that does something similar.

Basically you have to use the I6 print statement to write to a static I6 array, and then convert that to an I7 text object. TEXT_TY_CastPrimitive() is probably a good model. I think.

7

Thanks again, zarf. I’ll look into it (and the commentary in Text.i6t) to see if I can make any sense of it.