I7 - will this hack come back to bite me?

Authoring Inform 7
1

I consider having two repair actions, since repairing meat and machinery would act completely different. So I made a repa1ring action for “repair spoon” and a repairing action for “repair donald”.

But is this okay code?

[code]SECTION - REPAIRING MEAT-THINGIES

repa1ring is an action applying to one thing.
Understand “repair [someone]” as repa1ring.
Report repa1ring someone:
Say “Whoever is now repaired!”;

SECTION - REPARING MACHINERY

repairing is an action applying to one thing.
Understand “repair [something]” as repairing.
Report repairing something:
Say “Whatever is now repaired!”;

SECTION - MY EXITING WORLD!

The Holy Platform of Pi is a room.
Electric spoon is a thing in The Holy Platform of Pi.
Donald is a person in The Holy Platform of Pi.[/code]

2

Why not just use a single action with multiple rules?

3

Also, if I’m not completely wrong (which can be: it’s 3 AM here), [something] overrides [someone] as an inform thing can be a person. Right?

4

Jamespking, you’re right, Inform totally objectifies people! (but don’t happen in my code, though, for whatever reason)

5

Draconis, I’m not completely sure about this. But I sort of see it as two different actions, which just happens to share the same words. In the repa1ring action I could add 10 to the nouns life points, without bothering about that a spoon do not have life points, as it is not a person. To me, it sort of seem logical that these are seperate actions.

6

For clarity, I’d give the actions much better names, such as healing and mending. I’d also add understand vocab lines for those verbs too, in addition to the overriden repair vocab.

7

You could probably achieve something similar like this (untested):

[code]Healing is an action applying to one thing.
Repairing is an action applying to one thing. Understand “repair [something]” as repairing.

Before repairing a person: try healing the noun instead.[/code]

Then you could write action rules for healing without worrying that they would accidentally get applied to things that weren’t people. (I used “First before” rather than “Instead” just to make sure that the action gets redirected at the first possible opportunity.)

I’m not sure that this has any special advantages over using two different Understand lines, though.

8

Thanks Matt - much better solution! It tells Inform directly what it want, instead of the previous ones vague suggestion.

9

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-Wade