[I7] 6M62 doesn't define some meta verbs as meta that it should?

Authoring Inform 7
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I was looking through some of the I6 code generated by a test, and I noted that some verbs are not defined with the meta keyword in code produced by 6M62. Here’s what I’m seeing:

Defined as meta (expected): abstract, actions, glklist, gonear, purloin, random, relations, responses, rules, scenes, scope, showheap, showme, showverb, test, trace, tree

Not defined as meta (unexpected): brief*, long, normal, notify*, nouns, pronouns, quit*, restart*, restore*, save*, score*, script, short, superbrief, transcript, verbose, verify*, version

The ones marked with asterisks might conceivably be used as a verb for a different action in a story, so maybe these shouldn’t be marked as meta. (Does “Understand … as something new.” clear the meta flag?)

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AFAIK, I7 code doesn’t care about the meta keyword; it only exists on certain verbs for compatibility with I6.

The corresponding I7 concept is an action out of world, which most of those actions in your list (I didn’t find a counterexample, but I didn’t check all of them) are declared as.

(If you’re curious, it appears that I7 tracks this via the meta global variable and the OUT_OF_WORLD_ABIT action flag.)

1 Like
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@mirality, that’s very interesting (and reflects a better design by associating the functional property to the action instead of the dictionary word). Thank you!

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The “meta” tagged verbs are one that don’t work except in debug mode, as far as I know. The others, while they don’t normally affect the game world, are all things the player can type. So that looks to be the distinction there: verbs which only work in debug mode, and verbs which always work by default.

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The meta commands do not correspond to actions. The other commands listed correspond to out of world actions; these are genuine actions in the game, with associated rulebooks.

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@caleb and @jrb, thank you both for the follow-up. As you say, caleb, the ones marked meta in I6 output from I7 are all I7 debugging verbs. And it’s interesting, jrb, that the actions have no associated rulebooks (good find!).

I did a little testing, and, if Include (- -) is used to define an I6-style verb in an I7 project, the meta keyword still functions to suppress the passing of time, as it would in I6. So it has a functional role given that the I7 debugging verbs’ ActionSub() routines don’t call GenericVerbSub().